
Class __V^51?_1 
Book __iLej£— 
Copyright i\: 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 



Modern English Writers. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD Professor Saintsbury 

R. L. STEVENSON - L. Cope Cornford 

JOHN RUSKIN - Mrs. Meynell 

TENNYSON .... - Andrew Lang 
GEORGE ELIOT 

BROWNING - - - - - C. H. Herford 

FROUDE John Oliver Hobbes 

HUXLEY Edward Clodd 

THACKERAY .... Charles Whibley 

DICKENS - - - - - W. E. Henley 

*#* Other Volumes will be announced in due course. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 



BY 

ANDREW LANG 



I 



NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 

1901 



L.3 



THF UBRARY OF 
C(. ^dSESS, 

Two COflta RECEIVED 

OCT, 24 1901 

COPVRIGMT ENTRY 

CLAS3 (X KXo, No 

IttSt 

COPY 3. 






Copyright, igoi 
By Dodd, Mead & Company 



First Edition published October, iqoi 



CONTENTS. 



I. BOYHOOD— CAMBRIDGE — EARLY POEMS i 

II. POEMS OF 183I-I833 21 

III. 1837-I842 34 

IV. 1842-I848— "THE PRINCESS" 44 

V. " IN MEMORIAM "---... 

VI. AFTER " IN MEMORIAM " .. . 

VII. " THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO " - 



59 

78 

- 99 

VI IT. " ENOCH ARDEN." THE DRAMAS - I 

IX. LAST YEARS 

X. 1890 

XI. LAST CHAPTER ------ 



55 
190 
199 
20S 



INDEX 



222 



Introduction 



In writing this brief sketch of the Life of Tenny- 
son, and this attempt to appreciate his work, I have 
rested almost entirely on the Biography by Lord Ten- 
nyson (with his kind permission) and on the text of 
the Poems. As to the Life, doubtless current anec- 
dotes, not given in the Biography, are known to me, 
and to most people. But as they must also be familiar 
to the author of the Biography, I have not thought it 
desirable to include what he rejected. The works of 
the " localisers " I have not read : Tennyson disliked 
these researches, as a rule, and they appear to be un- 
essential, and often hazardous. The professed com- 
mentators I have not consulted. It appeared better 
to give one's own impressions of the Poems, unaffected 
by the impressions of others, except in one or two 
cases where matters of fact rather than of taste seemed 
to be in question. Thus on two or three points 
I have ventured to differ from a distinguished living 
critic, and have given the reasons for my dissent. 
Professor Bradley's Commentary on In Memorlam l came 
out after this sketch was in print. Many of the com- 
ments cited by Mr. Bradley from his predecessors ap- 
pear to justify my neglect of these curious inquirers. 

1 Macmillan & Co. 



Vlll INTRODUCTION. 

The " difficulties " which they raise are not likely, as 
a rule, to present themselves to persons who read poetry 
" for human pleasure." 

I have not often dwelt on parallels to be found in 
the works of earlier poets. In many cases Tennyson 
deliberately reproduced passages from Greek, Latin, 
and old Italian writers, just as Virgil did in the case of 
Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, and others. 
There are, doubtless, instances in which a phrase is 
unconsciously reproduced by automatic memory, from 
an English poet. But I am less inclined than Mr. 
Bradley to think that unconscious reminiscence is 
more common in Tennyson than in the poets gener- 
ally. I have not closely examined Keats and Shelley, 
for example, to see how far they were influenced by 
unconscious memory. But Scott, confessedly, was 
apt to reproduce the phrases of others, and once un- 
wittingly borrowed from a poem by the valet of one 
of his friends ! I believe that many of the alleged 
borrowings in Tennyson are either no true parallels at 
all or are the unavoidable coincidences of expression 
which must inevitably occur. The poet himself 
stated, in a lively phrase, his opinion of the hunters 
after parallels, and I confess that I am much of his 
mind. They often remind me of Mr. Punch's parody 
on an unfriendly review of Alexander Smith — 

" Most women have no character at all." — Pope. 
u No character that servant woman asked." — Smith. 

I have to thank Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Ver- 
non Rendall for their kindness in reading my proof- 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

sheets. They have saved me from some errors, but I 
may have occasionally retained matter which, for one 
reason or another, did not recommend itself to them. 
In no case are they responsible for the opinions ex- 
pressed, or for the critical estimates. They are those 
of a Tennysonian, and, no doubt, would be other than 
they are if the writer were younger than he is. It 
does not follow that they would necessarily be more 
correct, though probably they would be more in vogue. 
The point of view must shift with each generation of 
readers, as ideas or beliefs go in or out of fashion, are 
accepted, rejected, or rehabilitated. To one age Ten- 
nyson may seem weakly superstitious ; to another 
needlessly sceptical. After all, what he must live by 
is, not his opinions, but his poetry. The poetry of 
Milton survives his ideas; whatever may be the fate 
of the ideas of Tennyson, his poetry must endure. 



TENNYSON 



BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 

The life and work of Tennyson present something 
like the normal type of what, in circumstances as for- 
tunate as mortals may expect, the life and work of a 
modern poet ought to be. A modern poet, one says, 
because even poetry is now affected by the division of 
labour. We do not look to the poet for a large share 
in the practical activities of existence : we do not ex- 
pect him, like ^Eschylus and Sophocles, Theognis and 
Alcaeus, to take a conspicuous part in politics and 
war; or even, as in the Age of Anne, to shine among 
wits and in society. Life has become, perhaps, too 
specialised for such multifarious activities. Indeed, 
even in ancient days, as a Celtic proverb and as the 
picture of life in the Homeric epics prove, the poet 
was already a man apart — not foremost among states- 
men and rather backward among warriors. If we 
agree with a not unpopular opinion, the poet ought to 
be a kind of " Titanic " force, wrecking himself on 
his own passions and on the nature of things, as did 
Byron, Burns, Marlowe, and Musset. But Tenny- 



TENNYSON 



son's career followed lines really more normal, the 
lines of the life of Wordsworth, wisdom and self-con- 
trol directing the course of a long, sane, sound, and 
fortunate existence. The great physical strength 
which is commonly the basis of great mental vigour 
was not ruined in Tennyson by poverty and passion, 
as in the case of Burns, nor in forced literary labour, 
as in those of Scott and Dickens. For long he was 
poor, like Wordsworth and Southey, but never desti- 
tute. He made his early effort : he had his time of 
great sorrow, and trial, and apparent failure. With 
practical wisdom he conquered circumstances ; he be- 
came eminent ; he outlived reaction against his genius ; 
he died in the fulness of a happy age and of renown. 
This full-orbed life, with not a few years of sorrow 
and stress, is what Nature seems to intend for the ca- 
reer of a divine minstrel. If Tennyson missed the 
"one crowded hour of glorious life," he had not to be 
content in " an age without a name." 

It was not Tennyson's lot to illustrate any modern 
theory of the origin of genius. Born in 1809 of a 
Lincolnshire family, long connected with the soil but 
inconspicuous in history, Tennyson had nothing Celtic 
in his blood, as far as pedigrees prove. This is un- 
fortunate for one school of theorists. His mother 
(genius is presumed to be derived from mothers) had 
a genius merely for moral excellence and for religion. 
She is described in the poem of Isabel, and was " a 
remarkable and saintly woman." In the male line, 
the family was not (as the families of genius ought to 
be) brief of life and unhealthy. u The Ten ny sons 



BOYHOOD CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 3 

never die," said the sister who was betrothed to 
Arthur Hallam. The father, a clergyman, was, says 
his grandson, u a man of great ability," and his 
" excellent library " was an element in the educa- 
tion of his family. " My father was a poet," 
Tennyson said, " and could write regular verse very 
skilfully." In physical type the sons were tall, strong, 
and unusually dark : Tennyson, when abroad, was 
not taken for an Englishman ; at home, strangers 
thought him " foreign." Most of the children had 
the temperament, and several of the sons had some of 
the accomplishments, of genius : whence derived by 
way of heredity is a question beyond conjecture, for 
the father's accomplishment was not unusual. As 
Walton says of the poet and the angler, they "were 
born to be so " : we know no more. 

The region in which the paternal hamlet of Som- 
ersby lies, " a land of quiet villages, large fields, 
gray hillsides, and noble tall-towered churches, on the 
lower slope of a Lincolnshire wold," does not appear 
to have been rich in romantic legend and tradition. 
The folk-lore of Lincolnshire, of which examples 
have been published, does indeed seem to have a pe- 
culiar poetry of its own, but it was rather the humor- 
ous than the poetical aspect of the country-people 
that Tennyson appears to have known. In brief, we 
have nothing to inform us as to how genius came into 
that generation of Tennysons which was born be- 
tween 1807 and 18 19. A source and a cause there 
must have been, but these things are hidden, except 
from popular science. 



4 TENNYSON 

Precocity is not a sign of genius, but genius is per- 
haps always accompanied by precocity. This is espe- 
cially notable in the cases of painting, music, and 
mathematics ; but in the matter of literature genius 
may chiefly show itself in acquisition, as in Sir 
Walter Scott, who when a boy knew much, but did 
little that would attract notice. As a child and a boy 
young Tennyson was remarked both for acquisition 
and performance. His own reminiscences of his 
childhood varied somewhat in detail. In one place 
we learn that at the age of eight he covered a slate 
with blank verse in the manner of Jamie Thomson, 
the only poet with whom he was then acquainted. 
In another passage he says, " The first poetry that 
moved me was my own at five years old. When I 
was eight I remember making a line I thought grander 
than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott. I rolled it out, it 
was this — 

' With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood ' — 

great nonsense, of course, but I thought it fine ! " 

It was fine, and was thoroughly Tennysonian. 
Scott, Campbell, and Byron probably never produced 
a line with the qualities of this nonsense verse. 
" Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy 
day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out, 
' I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind,' and the 
words ' far, far away ' had always a strange charm for 
me." A late lyric has this overword, Far, far away ! 
A boy of eight who knew the contemporary poets 
was more or less precocious. Tennyson also knew 



BOYHOOD CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 5 

Pope, and wrote hundreds of lines in Pope's measure. 
At twelve the boy produced an epic, in Scott's man- 
ner, of some six thousand lines. He " never felt 
himself more truly inspired," for the sense of " in- 
spiration " (as the late Mr. Myers has argued in an 
essay on the "Mechanism of Genius") has little to 
do with the actual value of the product. At fourteen 
Tennyson wrote a drama in blank verse. A chorus 
from this play (as one guesses), a piece from " an un- 
published drama written very early," is published in 
the volume of 1830: — 

" The varied earth, the moving heaven, 
The rapid waste of roving sea, 
The fountain-pregnant mountains riven 

To shapes of wildest anarchy, 
By secret fire and midnight storms 
That wander round their windy cones." 

These lines are already Tennysonian. There is the 
classical transcript, " the varied earth," dcedala tellus. 
There is the geological interest in the forces that shape 
the hills. There is the use of the favourite word 
" windy," and later in the piece — 

'* The troublous autumn's sallow gloom." 

The young poet from boyhood was original in his 
manner. 

Byron made him blase at fourteen. Then Byron 
died, and Tennyson scratched on a rock " Byron is 
dead," on " a day when the whole world seemed 
darkened for me." Later he considered Byron's 



TENNYSON 

poetry " too much akin to rhetoric." " Byron is not 
an artist or a thinker, or a creator in the higher sense, 
but a strong personality ; he is endlessly clever, and 
is now unduly depreciated." He " did give the world 
another heart and new pulses, and so we are kept go- 
ing." But " he was -dominated by Byron till he was 
seventeen, when he put him away altogether." 

In his boyhood, despite the sufferings which he 
endured for a while at school at Louth ; despite bully- 
ing from big boys and masters, Tennyson would 
" shout his verses to the skies." " Well, Arthur, I 
mean to be famous," he used to say to one of his 
brothers. He observed nature very closely by the 
brook and the thundering seashores : he was never a 
sportsman, and his angling was in the manner of the 
lover of The Miller's Daughter. He was seventeen 
(1826) when Poems by Two Brothers (himself and his 
brother Frederick) were published with the date 1827. 
These poems contain, as far as I have been able to 
discover, nothing really Tennysonian. What he had 
done in his own manner was omitted, " being thought 
too much out of the common for the public taste." 
The young poet had already saving common-sense, 
and understood the public. Fragments of the true 
gold are found in the volume of 1830, others are pre- 
served in the Biography. The ballad suggested by 
The Bride of Lammermoor was not unworthy of Bed- 
does, and that novel, one cannot but think, suggested 
the opening situation in Maud, where the hero is a 
modern Master of Ravenswood in his relation to the 
rich interloping family and the beautiful daughter. 



BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 7 

To this point we shall return. It does not appear 
that Tennyson was conscious in Maud of the sugges- 
tion from Scott, and the coincidence may be merely 
accidental. 

The Lover s Tale, published in 1879, was mainly a 
work of the poet's nineteenth year. A few copies 
had been printed for friends. One of these, with 
errors of the press, and without the intended altera- 
tions, was pirated by an unhappy man in 1875. In 
old age Tennyson brought out the work of his boy- 
hood. " It was written before I had ever seen Shel- 
ley, though it is called Shelleyan," he said ; and in- 
deed he believed that his work had never been imita- 
tive, after his earliest efforts in the manner of 
Thomson and of Scott. The only things in The 
Lover s Tale which would suggest that the poet here 
followed Shelley are the Italian scene of the story, 
the character of the versification, and the extraordi- 
nary luxuriance and exuberance of the imagery. 1 As 
early as 1868 Tennyson heard that written copies of 
The Lover's Tale were in circulation. He then re- 
marked, as to the exuberance of the piece : " Allow- 
ance must be made for abundance of youth. It is 
rich and full, but there are mistakes in it. 
The poem is the breath of young love." 

How truly Tennysonian the manner is may be un- 
derstood even from the opening lines, full of the 
original cadences which were to become so familiar : — 

1 To the present writer, as to others, The Lover's Tale appeared 
to be imitative of Shelley, but if Tennyson had never read Shelley, 
cadit quczstio. 



8 TENNYSON 

" Here far away, seen from the topmost cliff, 
Filling with purple gloom the vacancies 
Between the tufted hills, the sloping seas 
Hung in mid-heaven, and half-way down rare sails, 
White as white clouds, floated from sky to sky." 

The narrative in the two first parts (which alone were 
written in youth) is so choked with images and de- 
scriptions as to be almost obscure. It is the story, 
practically, of a love like that of Paul and Virginia, 
but the love is not returned by the girl, who prefers 
the friend of the narrator. Like the hero of Maud, 
the speaker has a period of madness and illusion ; 
while the third part, "The Golden Supper" — sug- 
gested by a story of Boccaccio, and written in maturity 
— is put in the mouth of another narrator, and is in a 
different style. The discarded lover, visiting the 
vault which contains the body of his lady, finds her 
alive, and restores her to her husband. The whole 
finished legend is necessarily not among the author's 
masterpieces. But perhaps not even Keats in his 
earliest work displayed more of promise, and gave 
more assurance of genius. Here and there come 
turns and phrases, " all the charm of all the Muses," 
which remind a reader of things later well known in 
pieces more mature. Such lines are — 
" Strange to me and sweet, 
Sweet through strange years," 
and — 

" Like to a low-hung and a fiery sky 

****** 
Hung round with ragged rims and burning folds." 



BOYHOOD CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 9 

And — 

" Like sounds without the twilight realm of dreams, 
Which wander round the bases of the hills." 

We also note close observation of nature in the curi- 
ous phrase — 

" Cries of the partridge like a rusty key- 
Turned in a lock." 

Of this kind was Tennyson's adolescent vein, when 
he left 

" The poplars four 
That stood beside his father's door," 

and the Somersby brook, and the mills and granges, 
the seas of the Lincolnshire coast, and the hills and 
dales among the wolds, for Cambridge. He was well 
read in old and contemporary English literature, and in 
the classics. Already he was acquainted with the 
singular trance-like condition to which his poems oc- 
casionally allude, a subject for comment later. He 
matriculated at Trinity, with his brother Charles, on 
February 20, 1828, and had an interview of a not quite 
friendly sort with a proctor before he wore the gown. 
That Tennyson should go to Cambridge, not to 
Oxford, was part of the nature of things, by which 
Cambridge educates the majority of English poets, 
whereas Oxford has only " turned out " a few — like 
Shelley. At that time, as in Macaulay's day, the path 
of university honours at Cambridge lay through Math- 
ematics, and, except for his prize poem in 1829, Ten- 
nyson took no honours at all. His classical reading 



10 TENNYSON 

was pursued as literature, not as a course of grammar 
and philology. No English poet, at least since Mil- 
ton, had been better read in the classics; but Tenny- 
son's studies did not aim at the gaining of academic 
distinction. His aspect was such that Thompson, 
later Master of Trinity, on first seeing him come into 
hall, said, "That man must be a poet." Like Byron, 
Shelley, and probably Coleridge, Tennyson looked 
the poet that he was : " Six feet high, broad-chested, 
strong-limbed, his face Shakespearian and with deep 
eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy 
hair, his head finely poised." 

Not much is recorded of Tennyson as an under- 
graduate. In our days efforts would have been made 
to enlist so promising a recruit in one of the college 
boats ; but rowing was in its infancy. It is a pecul- 
iarity of the universities that little flocks of men of 
unusual ability come up at intervals together, break- 
ing the monotony of idlers, prize scholars, and honours 
men. Such a group appeared at Balliol in Matthew 
Arnold's time, and rather later, at various colleges, in 
the dawn of Pre-Raphaelitism. The Tennysons — 
Alfred, Frederick, and Charles — were members of 
such a set. There was Arthur Hallam, son of the 
historian, from Eton ; there was Spedding, the editor 
and biographer of Bacon ; Milnes (Lord Houghton), 
Blakesley (Dean of Lincoln), Thompson, Merivale, 
Trench (a poet, and later, Archbishop of Dublin), 
Brookfield, Buller, and, after Tennyson the greatest, 
Thackeray, a contemporary if not an "Apostle." 
Charles Buller's, like Hallam's, was to be an " unful- 



BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS II 

filled renown." Of Hallam, whose name is forever 
linked with his own, Tennyson said that he would 
have been a great man, but not a great poet ; " he was 
as near perfection as mortal man could be." His 
scanty remains are chiefly notable for his divination 
of Tennyson as a great poet ; for the rest, we can 
only trust the author of In Memorlam and the verdict 
of tradition. 

The studies of the poet at this time included origi- 
nal composition in Greek and Latin verse, history, 
and a theme that he alone has made poetical, natural 
science. All poetry has its roots in the age before 
natural science was more than a series of nature- 
myths. The poets have usually, like Keats, regretted 
the days when 

" There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," 

when the hills and streams were not yet " dispeopled 
of their dreams." Tennyson, on the other hand, was 
already finding material for poetry in the world as 
seen through microscope and telescope, and as devel- 
oped through " seonian " processes of evolution. In 
a note-book, mixed with Greek, is a poem on the 
Moon — not the moon of Selene, " the orbed Maiden," 
but of astronomical science. In Memoriam recalls the 
conversations on labour and politics, discussions of 
the age of the Reform Bill, of rick-burning (expected 
to u make taters cheaper " ), and of Catholic emanci- 
pation; also the emancipation of such negroes as had 
not yet tasted the blessings of freedom. In politics 
Tennyson was what he remained, a patriot, a friend 



12 TENNYSON 

of freedom, a foe of disorder. His politics, he said, 
were those " of Shakespeare, Bacon, and every sane 
man." He was one of the Society of Apostles, and 
characteristically contributed an essay on Ghosts. 
Only the preface survives : it is not written in a scien- 
tific style ; but bids us " not assume that any vision 
is baseless." Perhaps the author went on to discuss 
" veridical hallucinations," but his ideas about these 
things must be considered later. 

It was by his father's wish that Tennyson competed 
for the English prize poem. The theme, Timbuctoo, 
was not inspiring. Thackeray wrote a good parody 
of the ordinary prize poem in Pope's metre : — 

" I see her sons the hill of glory mount, 
And sell their sugars on their own account ; 
Prone to her feet the prostrate nations come, 
Sue for her rice and barter for her rum." 

Tennyson's work was not much more serious : he 
merely patched up an old piece, in blank verse, on the 
battle of Armageddon. The poem is not destitute of 
Tennysonian cadence, and ends, not inappropriately, 
with "All was night." Indeed, all was night. 

An ingenious myth accounts for Tennyson's success : 
At Oxford, says Charles Wordsworth, the author was 
more likely to have been rusticated than rewarded. 
But already (1829) Arthur Hallam told Mr. Gladstone 
that Tennyson "promised fair to be the greatest poet 
of our generation, perhaps of our century." 

In 1830 Tennyson published the first volume of 
which he was sole author. Browning's Pauline was 



BOYHOOD CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 1 3 

of the year 1833. ^ was tne ver y dead hours of the 
Muses. The great Mr. Murray had ceased, as one 
despairing of song, to publish poetry. Bulwer Lytton, 
in the preface to Paul Clifford (1830), announced that 
poetry, with every other form of literature except the 
Novel, was unremunerative and unread. Coleridge 
and Scott were silent : indeed Sir Walter was near his 
death ; Wordsworth had shot his bolt, though an ar- 
row or two were left in the quiver. Keats, Shelley, 
and Byron were dead; Milman's brief vogue was de- 
parting. It seems as if novels alone could appeal to 
readers, so great a change in taste had been wrought 
by the sixteen years of Waverly romances. The 
slim volume of Tennyson was naturally neglected, 
though Leigh Hunt reviewed it in the Tatler. Hal- 
lam's comments in the Englishman's Maga%ine^ow^[\ 
enthusiastic (as was right and natural), were judicious. 
" The author imitates no one." Coleridge did not 
read all the book, but noted " things of a good deal 
of beauty. The misfortune is that he has begun to 
write verses without very well understanding what 
metre is." As Tennyson said in 1890, "So I, an 
old man, who get a poem or poems every day, might 
cast a casual glance at a book, and seeing something 
which I could not scan or understand, might possibly 
decide against the book without further consideration." 
As a rule, the said books are worthless. The number 
of versifiers make it hard, indeed, for the poet to win 
recognition. One little new book of rhyme is so like 
another, and almost all are of so little interest ! 

The rare book that differs from the rest has a 



14 TENNYSON 

bizarrerie with its originality, and in the poems of 
1830 there was, assuredly, more than enough of the 
bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epi- 
thets, and words like " tendriltwine " seemed provo- 
kingly affected. A kind of lusciousness, like that of 
Keats when under the influence of Leigh Hunt, may 
here and there be observed. Such faults as these 
catch the indifferent eye when a new book is first 
opened, and the volume of 1830 was probably con- 
demned by almost every reader of the previous gener- 
ation who deigned to afford it a glance. Out of 
fifty-six pieces only twenty-three were reprinted in the 
two volumes of 1842, which won for Tennyson the 
general recognition of the world of letters. Five or 
six of the pieces then left out were added as Juvenilia 
in the collected works of 187 1, 1872. The whole 
mass deserves the attention of students of the poet's 
development. 

This early volume may be said to contain, in the 
germ, all the great original qualities of Tennyson, ex- 
cept the humour of his rural studies and the elabora- 
tion of his Idylls. For example, in Mariana we first 
note what may be called his perfection and mature 
accomplishment. The very few alterations made 
later are verbal. The moated grange of Mariana in 
Measure for Measure, and her mood of desertion and 
despair, are elaborated by a precision of truth and 
with a perfection of harmony worthy of Shakespeare 
himself, and minutely studied from the natural scenes 
in which the poet was born. If these verses alone 
survived out of the wreck of Victorian literature. 



BOYHOOD CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS 15 

they would demonstrate the greatness of the author 
as clearly as do the fragments of Sappho. Isabel (a 
study of the poet's mother) is almost as remarkable in 
its stately dignity ; while Recollections of the Arabian 
Nights attest the power of refined luxury in romantic 
description, and herald the unmatched beauty of The 
Lotos-Eaters. The Poet, again, is a picture of that 
ideal which Tennyson himself was to fulfil ; and 
Oriana is a revival of romance, and of the ballad, not 
limited to the ballad form as in its prototype, Helen 
of Kirkconnell. Curious and exquisite experiment in 
metre is indicated in the Leonine Elgiacs, in Claribel, 
and several other poems. Qualities which were not 
for long to find public expression, speculative powers 
brooding, in various moods, on ultimate and insoluble 
questions, were attested by The Mystic, and Supposed 
Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind not in 
Unity with Itself an unlucky title of a remarkable 
performance. " In this, the most agitated of all his 
poems, we find the soul urging onward 

' Thro ! utter dark a full-sail'd skiff, 
Unpiloted i' the echoing dance 
Of reboant whirlwinds ; ' 

and to the question, c Why not believe, then ? ' we 
have as answer a simile of the sea, which cannot 
slumber like a mountain tarn, or 

' Draw down into his vexed pools 
All that blue heaven which hues and paves ' 

the tranquil inland mere." 1 

1 F. W. H. Myers, Science and a Future Life, p. 133. 



1 6 TENNYSON 

The poet longs for the faith of his infant days and 
of his mother — 

" Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew 
The beauty and repose of faith, 
And the clear spirit shining thro'." 

That faith is already shaken, and the long struggle for 
belief has already begun. 

Tennyson, according to Matthew Arnold, was not 
un esprit puissant. Other and younger critics, who 
have attained to a cock-certain mood of negation, are 
apt to blame him because, in fact, he did not finally 
agree with their opinions. If a man is necessarily a 
weakling or a hypocrite because, after trying all things, 
he is not an atheist or a materialist, then the reproach 
of insincerity or of feebleness of mind must rest upon 
Tennyson. But it is manifest that, almost in boy- 
hood, he had already faced the ideas which, to one of 
his character, almost meant despair : he had not kept 
his eyes closed. To his extremely self-satisfied ac- 
cusers we might answer, in lines from this earliest 
volume ( The Mystic) : — 

" Ye scorn him with an undiscerning scorn ; 
Ye cannot read the marvel in his eye 
The still serene abstraction." 

He would behold 

" One shadow in the midst of a great light, 
One reflex from eternity on time, 
One mighty countenance of perfect calm, 
Awful with most invariable eyes." 



BOYHOOD— CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS f] 

His mystic of these boyish years — 

" often lying broad awake, and yet 
Remaining from the body, and apart 
In intellect and power and will, hath heard 
Time flowing in the middle of the night, 
And all things creeping to a day of doom." 

In this poem, never republished by the author, is an 
attempt to express an experience which in later years 
he more than once endeavoured to set forth in articu- 
late speech, an experience which was destined to col- 
our his final speculations on ultimate problems of 
God and of the soul. We shall later have to discuss 
the opinion of an eminent critic, Mr. Frederic Harri- 
son, that Tennyson's ideas, theological, evolutionary, 
and generally speculative, " followed, rather than cre- 
ated, the current ideas of his time." " The train of 
thought" (in In Memoriam), writes Mr. Harrison, " is 
essentially that with which ordinary English readers 
had been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor 
Jowett, Dr. Martineau, Ecce Homo, Hypatia." Of 
these influences only Maurice, and Maurice only 
orally, could have reached the author of The Mystic, 
and the Supposed Confessions. Ecce Homo, Hypatia, 
Mr. Jowett, were all in the bosom of the future 
when In Memoriam was written. Now, The Mystic 
and the Supposed Confessions are prior to In Memoriam, 
earlier than 1830. Yet they already contain the chief 
speculative tendencies of In Memoriam ; the growing 
doubts caused by evolutionary ideas (then familiar to 
Tennyson, though not to " ordinary English read- 



l8 TENNYSON 

ers "), the longing for a return to childlike faith, and 
the mystical experiences which helped Tennyson to 
recover a faith that abode with him. In these things 
he was original. Even as an undergraduate he was 
not following "a train of thought made familiar" by 
authors who had not yet written a line, and by books 
which had not yet been published. 

So much, then, of the poet that was to be and of 
the philosopher existed in the little volume of the un- 
dergraduate. In The Mystic we notice a phrase, two 
words long, which was later to be made familiar, 
" Daughters of time, divinely tall," reproduced in the 
picture of Helen : — 

" A daughter of the Gods, divinely tall, 
And most divinely fair." 

The reflective pieces are certainly of more interest 
now (though they seem to have satisfied the poet less) 
than the gallery of airy fairy Lilians, Adelines, Rosa- 
linds, and Eleanores : — 



like 



Daughters of dreams and of stones," 



" Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, 
Felise, and Yolande, and Juliette." 

Cambridge, which he was soon to leave, did not 
satisfy the poet. Oxford did not satisfy Gibbon, or 
later, Shelley ; and young men of genius are not, in 
fact, usually content with universities which, per- 
haps, are doing their best, but are neither governed by 



BOYHOOD — CAMBRIDGE EARLY POEMS IO, 

nor populated by minds of the highest and most 
original class. 

" You that do profess to teach 
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart." 

The universities, in fact, teach a good deal of that 
which can be learned, but the best things cannot be 
taught. The universities give men leisure, books, 
and companionship, to learn for themselves. All 
tutors cannot be, and at that time few dreamed of be- 
ing, men like Jowett and T. H. Green, Gamaliels at 
whose feet undergraduates sat with enthusiasm, " did 
eagerly frequent," like Omar Khayyam. In later 
years Tennyson found closer relations between dons 
and undergraduates, and recorded his affection for his 
university. She had supplied him with such com- 
panionship as is rare, and permitted him to " catch the 
blossoms of the flying terms," even if tutors and lec- 
turers were creatures of routine, terriblement enfonces 
dans la matiere, like the sire of Madelon and Cathos, 
that honourable citizen. 

Tennyson just missed, by going down, a visit of 
Wordsworth to Cambridge. The old enthusiast of 
revolution was justifying passive obedience : thirty 
years had turned the almost Jacobin into an almost 
Jacobite. Such is the triumph of time. In the 
summer of 1830 Tennyson, with Hallam, visited the 
Pyrenees. The purpose was political ; to aid some 
Spanish rebels. The fruit is seen in (E?ione, and 
Mariana in the South. 

In March 1831 Tennyson lost his father. " He 



20 TENNYSON 

slept in the dead man's bed, earnestly desiring to see 
his ghost, but no ghost came." " You see," he said, 
"ghosts do not generally come to imaginative peo- 
ple ; " a remark very true, though ghosts are attributed 
to " imagination." Whatever causes these phantasms, 
it is not the kind of phantasia which is consciously 
exercised by the poet. Coleridge had seen far too 
many ghosts to believe in them, and Coleridge and 
Donne apart, with the hallucinations of Goethe and 
Shelley, who met themselves, what poet ever did " see 
a ghost " ? One who saw Tennyson as he wandered 
alone at this period called him " a mysterious being, 
seemingly lifted high above other mortals, and having 
a power of intercourse with the spirit world not 
granted to others." But it was the world of the poet, 
not of the " medium." 

The Tennysons stayed on at the parsonage for 
six years. But, anticipating their removal, Arthur 
Hallam in 1831 dealt in prophecy about the identifi- 
cation in the district of places in his friend's poems 
— " critic after critic will trace the wanderings of the 
brook," as, in fact, critic after critic has done. 
Tennyson disliked these " localisers." The poet's 
walks were shared by Arthur Hallam, then affianced 
to his sister Emily. 



II 

POEMS OF 183I-1833 

By 1832 most of the poems of Tennyson's second 
volume were circulating in MS. among his friends, 
and no poet ever had friends more encouraging. Per- 
haps bards of to-day do not find an eagerness among 
their acquaintance for effusions in manuscript, or in 
proof-sheets. The charmed volumes appeared at the 
end of the year (dated 1833), and Hallam denounced 
as " infamous " Lockhart's review in the Quarterly. 
Infamous or not, it is extremely diverting. How 
Lockhart could miss the great and abundant poetry 
remains a marvel. Ten years later the Scorpion re- 
pented, and invited Sterling to review any book he 
pleased, for the purpose of enabling him to praise the 
two volumes of 1842, which he did gladly. Lock- 
hart hated all affectation and " preciosity," of which 
the new book was not destitute. He had been among 
Wordsworth's most ardent admirers when Words- 
worth had few, but the memories of the war with the 
" Cockney School " clung to him, the war with Leigh 
Hunt, and now he gave himself up to satire. Prob- 
ably he thought that the poet was a member of a 
London clique. There is really no excuse for Lock- 
hart, except that he did repent, that much of his 
banter was amusing, and that, above all, his cen- 



22 TENNYSON 

sures were accepted by the poet, who altered, later, 
many passages of a fine absurdity criticised by the 
infamous reviewer. One could name great prose- 
writers, historians, who never altered the wondrous 
errors to which their attention was called by critics. 
Prose-writers have been more sensitively attached to 
their glaring blunders in verifiable facts than was 
this very sensitive poet to his occasional lapses in 
taste. 

The Lady of Shalott, even in its early form, was 
more than enough to give assurance of a poet. In 
effect it is even more poetical, in a mysterious way, if 
infinitely less human, than the later treatment of the 
same or a similar legend in Elaine. It has the charm 
of Coleridge, and an allegory of the fatal escape from 
the world of dreams and shadows into that of realities 
may have been really present to the mind of the 
young poet, aware that he was " living in phantasy." 
The alterations are usually for the better. The 
daffodil is not an aquatic plant, as the poet seems to 
assert in the first form — 

" The yellow-leaved water-lily, 
The green sheathed daffodilly, 
Tremble in the water chilly, 
Round about Shalott." 

Nobody can prefer to keep 

" Though the squally east wind keenly 
Blew, with folded arms serenely 
By the water stood the queenly 
Lady of Shalott." 



POEMS OF 183I-1833 23 

However stoical the Lady may have been, the reader 
is too seriously sympathetic with her inevitable dis- 
comfort — 

" All raimented in snowy white 
That loosely flew," 

as she was. The original conclusion was distressing •, 
we were dropped from the airs of mysterious ro- 
mance : — 

" They crossed themselves, their stars they blest, 
Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest, 
There lay a parchment on her breast, 
That puzzled more than all the rest 
The well-fed wits at Camelot." 

Hitherto we have been " puzzled," but as with the 
sublime incoherences of a dream. Now we meet 
well-fed wits, who say, " Bless my stars ! " as perhaps 
we should also have done in the circumstances — a 
dead lady arriving, in a very cold east wind, alone in 
a boat, for " her blood was frozen slowly," as was 
natural, granting the weather and the lady's airy 
costume. It is certainly matter of surprise that the 
young poet's vision broke up in this humorous man- 
ner. And, after all, it is less surprising that the 
Scorpion, finding such matter in a new little book 
by a new young man, was more sensitive to the ab- 
surdity than to the romance. But no lover of poetry 
should have been blind to the almost flawless ex- 
cellence of Mariana in the South, inspired by the 
landscape of the Provencal tour with Arthur Hallam. 



24 TENNYSON 

In consequence of Lockhart's censures, or in defer- 
ence to the maturer taste of the poet, The Miller's 
Daughter was greatly altered before 1842. It is one 
of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of Tennyson's 
domestic English idylls, poems with conspicuous 
beauties, but not without sacrifices to that Muse of 
the home affections on whom Sir Barnes Newcome 
delivered his famous lecture. The seventh stanza 
perhaps hardly deserved to be altered, as it is, so as to 
bring in " minnows " where " fish " had been the 
reading, and where " trout " would best recall an 
English chalk stream. To the angler the rising trout, 
which left the poet cold, is at least as welcome as 
" the reflex of a beauteous form." " Every woman 
seems an angel at the waterside," said " that good 
old angler, now with God," Thomas Todd Stoddart, 
and so " the long and listless boy " found it to be. 
It is no wonder that the mother was " slowly brought 
to yield consent to my desire." The domestic affec- 
tions, in fact, do not adapt themselves so well to 
poetry as the passion, unique in Tennyson, of Fatima. 
The critics who hunt for parallels or plagiarisms will 
note — 

" O Love, O fire ! once he drew 
With one long kiss my whole soul thro' 
My lips," 

and will observe Mr. Browning's 

" Once he kissed 
My soul out in a fiery mist." 



POEMS OF 1831—1833 25 

As to (Enone, the scenery of that earliest of the 
classical idylls is borrowed from the Pyrenees, and the 
tour with Hallam. " It is possible that the poem 
may have been suggested by Beattie's 'Judgment of 
Paris" says Mr. Collins, it is also possible that the 
tale which 

" Quintus Calaber 
Somewhat lazily handled of old " 

may have reached Tennyson's mind from an older 
writer than Beattie. He is at least as likely to have 
been familiar with Greek myth as with the lamented 
"Minstrel." The form of 1833, greatly altered in 
1842, contained such unlucky phrases as "cedar 
shadowy," and " snowycoloured," " marblecold," 
" violeteyed " — easy spoils of criticism. The altera- 
tions which converted a beautiful but faulty, into a 
beautiful and flawless poem perhaps obscure the 
significance of CEnone's " I will not die alone," 
which in the earlier volume directly refers to the fore- 
seen end of all as narrated in Tennyson's late piece, 
The Death of CEnone. The whole poem brings to 
mind the glowing hues of Titian and the famous 
Homeric lines on the divine wedlock of Zeus and 
Hera. 

The allegory or moral of The Palace of Art does 
not need explanation. Not many of the poems owe 
more to revision. The early stanza about Isaiah, 
with fierce Ezekiel, and " Eastern Confutzee," did 
undeniably remind the reader, as Lockhart said, of 
The Groves of Blarney. 



26 TENNYSON 

"With statues gracing that noble place in, 
All haythen goddesses most rare, 
Petrarch, Plato and Nebuchadnezzar, 
All standing naked in the open air." 

In the early version the Soul, being too much "up-to- 
date," 

" Lit white streams of dazzling gas," 

like Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford. 

" Thus her intense, untold delight, 
In deep or vivid colour, smell, and sound, 
Was flattered day and night." 

Lockhart was not fond of Sir Walter's experiments in 
gas, the " smell " gave him no " deep, untold delight," 
and his " infamous review " was biassed by these 
circumstances. 

The volume of 1833 was in nothing more remark- 
able than in its proof of the many-sidedness of the 
author. He offered mediaeval romance, and classical 
perfection touched with the romantic spirit, and do- 
mestic idyll, of which The May ®hieen is probably the 
most popular example. The " mysterious being," 
conversant with " the spiritual world," might have 
been expected to disdain topics well within the range 
of Eliza Cook. He did not despise but elevated 
them, and thereby did more to introduce himself to the 
wide English public than he could have done by a 
century of Fatimas or Lotos-Eaters. On the other 
hand, a taste more fastidious, or more perverse, will 



POEMS OF 183I-1833 27 

scarcely be satisfied with pathos which in process of 
time has come to seem " obvious. " The pathos of 
early death in the prime of beauty is less obvious in 
Homer, where Achilles is to be the victim, or in the 
laments of the Anthology, where we only know that 
the dead bride or maiden was fair; but the poor May 
Queen is of her nature rather commonplace. 

" That good man, the clergyman, has told 
me words of peace," 

strikes a note rather resembling the Tennysonian 
parody of Wordsworth — 

" A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman. " 

The Lotos-Eaters, of course, is at the opposite pole 
of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odys- 
sey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de re- 
pere of the most magical vision expressed in the most 
musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, 
enriched with many classical memories, and pictures 
of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. 
After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, 
in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece: 
one of the eternal possessions of song. 

On the other hand, the opening of The Dream of 
Fair Women was marred in 1833 by the grotesque 
introductory verses about "a man that sails in a bal- 
loon." Young as Tennyson was, these freakish pas- 
sages are a psychological marvel in the work of one 
who did not lack the savage sense of humour. The 
poet, wafted on the wing and " pinion that the Theban 



28 TENNYSON 

eagle bear," cannot conceivably be likened to an 
aeronaut waving flags out of a balloon : except in a 
spirit of self-mockery which was not Tennyson's. 
His remarkable self-discipline in excising the fantastic 
and superfluous, and reducing his work to its classical 
perfection of thought and form, is nowhere more re- 
markable than in this magnificent vision. It is prob- 
ably by mere accidental coincidence of thought that, 
in the verses To J. S. (James Spedding), Tennyson 
reproduces the noble speech on the warrior's death, 
which Sir Walter Scott places in the lips of the great 
Dundee : " It is the memory which the soldier leaves 
behind him, like the long train of light that follows 
the sunken sun, that is all that is worth caring for," 
the light which lingers eternally on the hills of Atholl. 
Tennyson's lines are a close parallel : — 

" His memory long will live alone 

In all our hearts, as mournful light 
That broods above the fallen sun, 

And dwells in heaven half the night." 

Though Tennyson disliked the exhibition of " the 
chips of the workshop," we have commented on them, 
on the early readings of the early volumes. They 
may be regarded more properly as the sketches of a 
master than as " chips," and do more than merely en- 
gage the idle curiosity of the fanatics of first editions. 
They prove that the poet was studious of perfection, 
and wisely studious, for his alterations, unlike those 
of some authors, were almost invariably for the better, 
the saner, the more mature in taste. The early read- 



POEMS OF 183I-1833 29 

ings are also worth notice, because they partially ex- 
plain, by their occasionally fantastic and humourless 
character, the lack of early and general recognition of 
the poet's genius. The native prejudice of mankind 
is not in favour of a new poet. Of new poets there 
are always so many, most of them bad, that nature has 
protected mankind by an armour of suspiciousness. 
The world, and Lockhart, easily found good reasons 
for distrusting this new claimant of the ivy and the 
bays: moreover, since about 18 14 there had been a 
reaction against new poetry. The market was glutted. 
Scott had set everybody on reading, and too many on 
writing, novels. The great reaction of the century 
against all forms of literature except prose fiction had 
begun. Near the very date of Tennyson's first vol- 
ume Bulwer Lytton, as we saw, had frankly explained 
that he wrote novels because nobody would look at 
anything else. Tennyson had to overcome this uni- 
versal, or all but universal, indifference to new poetry, 
and, after being silent for ten years, overcome it he 
did; a remarkable victory of art and of patient cour- 
age. Times were even worse for poets than to-day. 
Three hundred copies of the new volume were sold ! 
But Tennyson's friends were not puffers in league 
with pushing publishers. 

Meanwhile the poet in 1833 went on quietly and 
undefeated with his work. He composed the Gar- 
dener's Daughter, and was at work on the Morte 
a" Arthur, suppressed till the ninth year, on the Hora- 
tian plan. Many poems were produced (and even 
written out, which a number of his pieces never were), 



3° 



TENNYSON 



and were left in manuscript till they appeared in 
the Biography. Most of these are so little worthy of 
the author that the marvel is how he came to write 
them — in what uninspired hours. Unlike Words- 
worth, he could weed the tares from his wheat. His 
studies were in Greek, German, Italian, history (a 
little), and chemistry, botany, and electricity — " cross- 
grained Muses,'' these last. 

It was on September 15, 1833, that Arthur Hallam 
died. Unheralded by sign or symptom of disease as 
it was, the news fell like a thunderbolt from a serene 
sky. Tennyson's and Hallam's love had been " pass- 
ing the love of women." A blow like this drives a 
man on the rocks of the ultimate, the insoluble prob- 
lems of destiny. " Is this the end ? " Nourished as 
on the milk of lions, on the elevating and strengthen- 
ing doctrines of popular science, trained from child- 
hood to forego hope and attend evening lectures, the 
young critics of our generation find Tennyson a weak- 
ling because he had hopes and fears concerning the 
ultimate renewal of what was more than half his life — 
his friendship. 

" That faith I fain would keep, 
That hope I'll not forego ; 
Eternal be the sleep 
Unless to waken so," 

wrote Lockhart, and the verses echoed ceaselessly in 
the widowed heart of Carlyle. These men, it is part 
of the duty of critics later born to remember, were 
not children or cowards, though they dreamed, and 



POEMS OF 183I-1833 31 

hoped, and feared. We ought to make allowance for 
failings incident to an age not yet fully enlightened by 
popular science, and still undivorced from spiritual 
ideas that are as old as the human race, and perhaps 
not likely to perish while that race exists. Now and 
then even scientific men have been mistaken, espe- 
cially when they have declined to examine evidence, as 
in this problem of the transcendental nature of the 
human spirit they usually do. At all events Tenny- 
son was unconvinced that death is the end, and 
shortly after the fatal tidings arrived from Vienna he 
began to write fragments in verse preluding to the 
poem of In Metnoriam. He also began, in a mood of 
great misery, The Two Voices ; or, Thoughts of a Sui- 
cide. The poem seems to have been partly done by 
September 1834, when Spedding commented on it, 
and on the beautiful Sir Galahad, "intended for 
something of a male counterpart to St. Agnes'* The 
Morte a" Arthur Tennyson then thought "the best 
thing I have managed lately." Very early in 1835 
many stanzas of In Metnoriam had taken form. "I 
do not wish to be dragged forward in any shape be- 
fore the reading public at present," wrote the poet, 
when he heard that Mill desired to write on him. 
His (Enone he had brought to its new perfection, and 
did not desire comments on work now several years 
old. He also wrote his Ulysses and his Tithonus. 

If ever the term " morbid " could have been applied 
to Tennyson, it would have been in the years immedi- 
ately following the death of Arthur Hallam. But the 
application would have been unjust. True, the poet 



32 TENNYSON 

was living out of the world ; he was unhappy, and he 
was, as people say, " doing nothing." He was so 
poor that he sold his Chancellor's prize gold medal, 
and he did not 

" Scan his whole horizon 
In quest of what he could clap eyes on," 

in the way of money-making, which another poet 
describes as the normal attitude of all men as well as 
of pirates. A careless observer would have thought 
that the poet was dawdling. But he dwelt in no 
Castle of Indolence ; he studied, he composed, he 
corrected his verses : like Sir Walter in Liddesdale 
"he was making himsel' a' the time." He did not 
neglect the movements of the great world in that 
dawn of discontent with the philosophy of commer- 
cialism. But it was not his vocation to plunge into 
the fray, and on to platforms. 

It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in Eng- 
land, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the 
duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a conse- 
quence, to the bride of St. Francis — Poverty. This 
loyalty Tennyson maintained, even under the tempta- 
tion to make money in recognised ways presented by 
his new-born love for his future wife, Miss Emily 
Sellwood. They had first met in 1830, when she, a 
girl of seventeen, seemed to him like " a Dryad or an 
Oread wandering here." But admiration became the 
affection of a lifetime when Tennyson met Miss Sell- 
wood as bridesmaid to her sister, the bride of his 
brother Charles, in 1836. The poet could not afford 



POEMS OF 183I-1833 33 

to marry, and, like the hero of Locksley Hall, he may 
have asked himself, " What is that which I should 
do?" By 1840 he had done nothing tangible and 
lucrative, and correspondence between the lovers was 
forbidden. That neither dreamed of Tennyson's de- 
serting poetry for a more normal profession proved of 
great benefit to the world. The course is one which 
could only be justified by the absolute certainty of 
possessing genius. 



Ill 

1837-1842 

In 1837 the Tennysons left the old rectory ; till 
1840 they lived at High Beech in Epping Forest, and 
after a brief stay at Tunbridge Wells went to Boxley, 
near Maidstone. 

It appears that at last the poet had " beat his music 
out," though his friends " still tried to cheer him." 
But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was 
fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypo- 
chondriac. " If I mean to make my mark at all, it 
must be by shortness," he said at this time ; " for the 
men before me had been so diffuse, and most of the 
big things, except King Arthur, had been done." 
The age had not la t'ete epique : Poe had announced 
the paradox that there is no such thing as a long 
poem, and even in dealing with Arthur, Tennyson 
followed the example of Theocritus in writing, not 
an epic, but epic idylls. Long poems suit an age of 
listeners, for which they were originally composed, or 
of leisure and few books. At present epics are read 
for duty's sake, not for the only valid reason, " for 
human pleasure," in FitzGerald's phrase. 

Between 1838 and 1840 Tennyson made some 
brief tours in England with FitzGerald, and, coming 
from Coventry, wrote Godiva. His engagement with 
34 



1837-1842 35 

Miss Sellwood seemed to be adjourned sine die, as 
they were forbidden to correspond. 

By 1 841 Tennyson was living at Mablethorpe on 
the Lincolnshire coast ; working at his volumes of 
1842, much urged by FitzGerald and American ad- 
mirers, who had heard of the poet through Emerson. 
Moxon was to be the publisher, himself something 
of a poet; but early in 1842 he had not yet received 
the MS. Perhaps Emerson heard of Tennyson 
through Carlyle, who, says Sterling, " said more in 
your praise than in any one's except Cromwell, and 
an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or 
forty people with a bowie-knife." Carlyle at this 
time was much attached to Lockhart, editor of the 
Quarterly Review, and it may have been Carlyle who 
converted Lockhart to admiration of his old victim. 
Carlyle had very little more appreciation of Keats 
than had Byron, or (in early days) Lockhart, and it 
was probably as much the man of heroic physical 
mould, " a Life-guardsman spoiled by making poetry," 
and the unaffected companion over a pipe, as the 
poet, that attracted him in Tennyson. As we saw, 
when the two triumphant volumes of 1842 did ap- 
pear, Lockhart asked Sterling to review whatever 
book he pleased (meaning the Poems) in the Quar- 
terly. The praise of Sterling may seem lukewarm to 
us, especially when compared with that of Spedding 
in the Edinburgh. But Sterling, and Lockhart too, 
were obliged to u gang warily." Lockhart had, to his 
constant annoyance, " a partner, Mr. Croker," and I 
have heard from the late Dean Boyle that Mr. Croker 



36 TENNYSON 

was much annoyed by even the mild applause yielded 
in the Quarterly to the author of the Morte cT Arthur. 
While preparing the volumes of 1842 while at Box- 
ley, Tennyson's life was divided between London and 
the society of his brother-in-law, Mr. Edmund Lush- 
ington, the great Greek scholar and Professor of Greek 
at Glasgow University. There was in Mr. Lush- 
ington's personal aspect, and noble simplicity of man- 
ner and character, something that strongly resembled 
Tennyson himself. Among their common friends 
were Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes), Mr. Lear 
of the Book of Nonsense ( " with such a pencil, such a 
pen " ), Mr. Venables (who at school modified the pro- 
file of Thackeray), and Lord Kelvin. In town Ten- 
nyson met his friends at The Cock, which he ren- 
dered classic ; among them were Thackeray, Forster, 
Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring : so- 
cial agitation, and " Carol philosophy " in Dickens, 
with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There 
was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic 
optimism, not yet fulfilled. 

" Fly, happy, happy sails, and bear the Press ! " 

That mission no longer strikes us as exquisitely felic- 
itous. " The mission of the Cross," and of the 
missionaries, means international complications ; and 
" the markets of the Golden Year " are precisely the 
most fruitful causes of wars and rumours of wars : — 

" Sea and air are dark 
With great contrivances of Power." 



1837-1842 37 

Tennyson's was not an unmitigated optimism, and 
had no special confidence in 

" The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings 
That every sophister can lime." 

His political poetry, in fact, was very unlike the so- 
cialist chants of Mr. William Morris, or Songs before 
Sunrise. He had nothing to say about 

" The blood on the hands of the King, 
And the lie on the lips of the Priest." 

The hands of Presidents have not always been un- 
stained ; nor are statements of a mythical nature con- 
fined to the lips of the clergy. The poet was anxious 
that freedom should " broaden down," but " slowly," 
not with indelicate haste. Persons who are more in 
a hurry will never care for the political poems, and it 
is certain that Tennyson did not feel sympathetically 
inclined towards the Iberian patriot who said that his 
darling desire was " to cut the throats of all the cures" 
like some Covenanters of old. " Mais vous connais- 
sez mon coeur " — " and a pretty black one it is," 
thought young Tennyson. So cautious in youth, 
during his Pyrenean tour with Hallam in 1830, Ten- 
nyson could not become a convinced revolutionary 
later. We must accept him with his limitations : nor 
must we confuse him with the hero of his Locks ley 
Hall, one of the most popular, and most parodied, of 
the poems of 1842 : full of beautiful images and " con- 
fusions of a wasted youth," a youth dramatically 
conceived, and in no way autobiographical. 



38 TENNYSON 

In so marvelous a treasure of precious things as 
the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, 
perfect, and perdurable than the Morte cT Arthur. It 
had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced 
by the poet " not bad." Tennyson was never, per- 
haps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap 
copy of Malory was his companion. 1 He does not 
appear to have gone deeply into the French and Ger- 
man " literature of the subject." Malory's compila- 
tion (1485) from French and English sources, with 
the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for 
him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the 
memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the 
hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. u A faint 
Homeric echo " it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but 
the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might 
have been chanted by 

" The lonely maiden of the Lake " 
when 

" Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps, 
Upon the hidden bases of the hills." 

Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the 
lines from the Odyssey — 

" Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow." 

" Softly through the flutes of the Grecians " came 
first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, 

1 The writer knew this edition before he knew Tennyson's poems. 



1837-1842 39 

then through Tennyson's own Lucretius, then in Mr. 
Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon : — 

" Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west 
Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea 
Rolls without wind forever, and the snow 
There shows not her white wings and windy feet, 
Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything, 
Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive." 

So fortunate in their transmission through poets have 
been the lines of " the Ionian father of the rest," the 
greatest of them all. 

In the variety of excellences which marks Tenny- 
son, the new English Idylls of 1842 hold their prom- 
inent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and 
more English than the picture of " the garden that I 
love." Theocritus cannot be surpassed ; but the idyll 
matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely 
followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the 
Sicilian never tried to paint. 

Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a 
Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. 
The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not 
among the more enduring of even the playful poems. 
The St. Simeon Sty lit es appears " made to the hand " 
of the author of Men and Women rather than of Ten- 
nyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so 
remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the 
truth of the picture, though the East has still her paral- 
lels to St. Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, 
incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to " society 



4 o 



TENNYSON 



verse " lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm 
of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches 
of actual history ; and thence to the strength and pas- 
sion of Love and Duty. Shall 

" Sin itself be found 
The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun " ? 

That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular 
modern moral. But Honour is the better part, and 
here was a poet who had the courage to say so ; 
though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age 
when highly respectable matrons assure us that 
" passion," like charity, covers a multitude of sins. 
Love and Duty, we must admit, is " early Victorian." 
The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte a" Arthur. 
It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam's death, 
and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his 

" Great Achilles whom we knew," 

as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. 
But it is later than these. Tennyson said, " Ulysses 
was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and 
gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and 
braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than 
anything in In Memoriam." Assuredly the expression 
is more simple, and more noble, and the personal 
emotion more dignified for the classic veil. When 
the plaintive Pessimist (" ' proud of the title,' as the 
Living Skeleton said when they showed him") tells us 



1837-1842 4 i 

that " not to have been born is best," we may answer 
with Ulysses — 

" Life piled on life 
Were all too little." 

The Ulysses of Tennyson, of course, is Dante's 
Ulysses, not Homer's Odysseus, who brought home 
to Ithaca not one of his mariners. His last known 
adventure, the journey to the land of men who knew 
not the savour of salt, Odysseus was to make on foot 
and alone ; so spake the ghost of Tiresias within the 
popular pale of Persephone. 

The Two Voices expresses the contest of doubts and 
griefs with the spirit of endurance and joy which 
speaks alone in Ulysses. The man who is unhappy, 
but does not want to put an end to himself, has 
certainly the better of the argument with the despair- 
ing Voice. The arguments of " that barren Voice " 
are, indeed, remarkably deficient in cogency and 
logic, if we can bring ourselves to strip the discussion 
of its poetry. The original title, Thoughts of a 
Suicide, was inappropriate. The suicidal suggestions 
are promptly faced and confuted, and the mood of the 
author is throughout that of one who thinks life 
worth living : — 

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly long'd for death. 

" 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
Oh life, not death, for which we pant ; 
More life, and fuller, that I want." 



42 TENNYSON 

This appears to be a satisfactory reply to the persons 
who eke out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic 
books, and hooting, as the great Alexandre Dumas 
says, at the great drama of Life. 

With the Day-Dream (of The Sleeping Beauty) 
Tennyson again displays his matchless range of 
powers. Verse of Society rises into a charmed and 
musical fantasy, passing from the Berlin-wool work 
of the period 

(" Take the broidery frame, and add 
A crimson to the quaint Macaw ") 

into the enchanted land of the fable : princes im- 
mortal, princesses eternally young and fair. The St. 
Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion pieces, contain the 
romance, as St. Simeon Stylites shows the repulsive side 
of asceticism ; for the saint and the knight are 
young, beautiful, and eager as St. Theresa in her 
childhood. It has been said, I do not know on what 
authority, that the poet had no recollection of com- 
posing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered 
composing The Bride of Lamtnertnoor, or Thackeray 
parts of Pendennis. The haunting of Tennyson's 
mind by the Arthurian legends prompted also the 
lovely fragment on the Queen's last Maying, Sir 
Launcelot and ®)ueen Guinevere, a thing of perfect 
charm and music. The ballads of Lady Clare and 
The Lord of Burleigh are not examples of the poet 
in his strength, for his power and fantasy we must 
turn to The Vision of Sin, where the early passages 
have the languid voluptuous music of the Lotos- 



1837-1842 43 

Eaters, with the ethical element superadded, while the 
portion beginning — 

" Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin ! " 

is in parts reminiscent of Burns's 'Jolly Beggars. In 
Break, Break, Break, we hear a note prelusive to In 
Memoriam, much of which was already composed. 

The Poems of 1842 are always vocal in the 
memories of all readers of English verse. None are 
more familiar, at least to men of the generations 
which immediately followed Tennyson's. Fitz- 
Gerald was apt to think that the poet never again at- 
tained the same level, and I venture to suppose that 
he never rose above it. For FitzGerald's opinion, 
right or wrong, it is easy to account. He had seen 
all the pieces in manuscript ; they were his cherished 
possession before the world knew them. C est mon 
homme, he might have said of Tennyson, as Boileau 
said of Moliere. Before the public awoke Fitz- 
Gerald had " discovered Tennyson," and that at the 
age most open to poetry and most enthusiastic in 
friendship. Again, the Poems of 1842 were short, 
while the Princess, Maud, and The Idylls of the King 
were relatively long, and, with In Memoriam, pos- 
sessed unity of subject. They lacked the rich, the 
unexampled variety of topic, treatment, and theme 
which marks the Poems of 1842. These were all 
reasons why FitzGerald should think that the two 
slim green volumes held the poet's work at its highest 
level. Perhaps he was not wrong, after all. 



IV 

1 842- 1 848 THE PRINCESS 

The Poems, and such criticisms as those of Sped- 
ding and Sterling, gave Tennyson his place. All the 
world of letters heard of him. Dean Bradley tells us 
how he took Oxford by storm in the days of the un- 
dergraduateship of Clough and Matthew Arnold. 
Probably both of these young writers did not share 
the undergraduate enthusiasm. Mr. Arnold, we 
know, did not reckon Tennyson un esprit puissant. 
Like Wordsworth (who thought Tennyson " decid- 
edly the first of our living poets, ... he has 
expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my 
writings "), Arnold was no fervent admirer of his 
contemporaries. Besides, if Tennyson's work is " a 
criticism of Life," the moral criticism, so far, was 
hidden in flowers, like the sword of Aristogiton at the 
feast. But, on the whole, Tennyson had won the 
young men who cared for poetry, though Sir Robert 
Peel had never heard of him : and to win the young, 
as Theocritus desired to do, is more than half the 
battle. On September 8, 1842, the poet was able to 
tell Mr. Lushington that " 500 of my books are sold ; 
according to Moxon's brother, I have made a sensa- 
tion." The sales were not like those of Childe Har- 
old or Marmion ; but for some twenty years new 
44 



1 842-1 848 THE PRINCESS 45 

poetry had not sold at all. Novels had come in about 
1 8 14, and few wanted or bought recent verse. But 
Carlyle was converted. He spoke no more of a 
spoiled guardsman. " If you knew what my relation 
has been to the thing called ' English Poetry ' for 
many years back, you would think such a fact " (his 
pleasure in the book) " surprising." Carlyle had been 
living (as Mrs. Carlyle too well knew) in Oliver 
Cromwell, a hero who probably took no delight in 
Lycidas or Comus, in Lovelace or Carew. " I would 
give all my poetry to have made one song like that," 
said Tennyson of Lovelace's Althea. But Noll 
would have disregarded them all alike, and Carlyle 
was full of the spirit of the Protector. To conquer 
him was indeed a victory for Tennyson ; while 
Dickens, not a reading man, expressed " his earnest 
and sincere homage." 

But Tennyson was not successful in the modern 
way. Nobody " interviewed " him. His photograph, 
of course, with disquisitions on his pipes and slippers, 
did not adorn the literary press. His literary income 
was not magnified by penny-a-liners. He did not be- 
come a lion ; he never would roar and shake his mane 
in drawing-rooms. Lockhart held that Society was 
the most agreeable form of the stage : the dresses and 
actresses incomparably the prettiest. But Tennyson 
liked Society no better than did General Gordon. He 
had friends enough, and no desire for new acquaint- 
ances. Indeed, his fortune was shattered at this time 
by a strange investment in wood-carving by machin- 
ery. Ruskin had only just begun to write, and wood- 



46 TENNYSON 

carving by machinery was still deemed an enterprise 
at once philanthropic and aesthetic. " My father's 
worldly goods were all gone," says Lord Tennyson. 
The poet's health suffered extremely ; he tried a fash- 
ionable u cure " at Cheltenham, where he saw mir- 
acles of healing, but underwent none. In September 
1845 Peel was moved by Lord Houghton to recom- 
mend the poet for a pension (^200 annually). " I 
have done nothing slavish to get it : I never even 
solicited for it either by myself or others." Like Dr. 
Johnson, he honourably accepted what was offered in 
honour. For some reason many persons who write 
in the press are always maddened when such good 
fortune, however small, however well merited, falls to 
a brother in letters. They, of course, were " cause- 
lessly bitter." " Let them rave ! " 

If few of the rewards of literary success arrived, 
the penalties at once began, and only ceased with the 
poet's existence. " If you only knew what a nui- 
sance these volumes of verse are ! Rascals send me 
theirs per post from America, and I have more than 
once been knocked up out of bed to pay three or four 
shillings for books of which I can't get through one 
page, for of all books the most insipid reading is 
second-rate verse." 

Would that versifiers took the warning ! Tenny- 
son had not sent his little firstlings to Coleridge and 
Wordsworth : they are only the hopeless rhymers who 
bombard men of letters with their lyrics and tragedies. 

Mr. Browning was a sufferer. To one young twit- 
terer he replied in the usual way. The bard wrote 



1842-1848 THE PRINCESS 47 

acknowledging the letter, but asking for a definite 
criticism. " I do not think myself a Shakespeare or 
a Milton, but I know I am better that Mr. Coventry 
Patmore or Mr. Austin Dobson." Mr. Browning 
tried to procrastinate : he was already deeply engaged 
with earlier arrivals of volumes of song. The poet 
was hurt, not angry ; he had expected other things 
from Mr. Browning : he ought to know his duty to 
youth. At the intercession of a relation Mr. Brown- 
ing now did -his best, and the minstrel, satisfied at last, 
repeated his conviction of his superiority to the 
authors of The Angel in the House and Beau Brocade. 
Probably no man, not even Mr. Gladstone, ever suf- 
fered so much from minstrels as Tennyson. He did 
not suffer them gladly. 

In 1846 the Poems reached their fourth edition. 
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton (bitten by what fly who 
knows ?) attacked Tennyson in The New Timon, a 
forgotten satire. We do not understand the ways of 
that generation. The cheap and spiteful genre of 
satire, with its forged morality, its sham indignation, 
its appeal to the ape-like passions, has gone out. 
Lytton had suffered many things (not in verse) from 
Jeames Yellowplush : I do not know that he hit back 
at Thackeray, but he " passed it on " to Thackeray's 
old college companion. . Tennyson, for once, replied 
(in Punch : the verses were sent thither by John 
Forster) ; the answer was one of magnificent con- 
tempt. But he soon decided that 

" The noblest answer unto such 

Is perfect stillness when they brawl." 



48 TENNYSON 

Long afterwards the poet dedicated a work to the 
son of Lord Lytton. He replied to no more satirists. 1 
Our difficulty, of course, is to conceive such an attack 
coming from a man of Lytton's position and genius. 
He was no hungry hack, and could, and did, do in- 
finitely better things than " stand in a false follow- 
ing " of Pope. Probably Lytton had a false idea that 
Tennyson was a rich man, a branch of his family being 
affluent, and so resented the little pension. The poet 
was so far from rich in 1846, and even after the pub- 
lication of The Princess, that his marriage had still to 
be deferred for four years. 

On reading The Princess afresh one is impressed, 
despite old familiarity, with the extraordinary influ- 
ence of its beauty. Here are, indeed, the best words 
best placed, and that curious felicity of style which 
makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. 
It is as if Tennyson had taken the advice which 
Keats gave to Shelley, " Load every rift with ore." 
To choose but one or two examples, how the purest 
and freshest impression of nature is re-created in 
mind and memory by the picture of Melissa with 

" All her thoughts as fair within her eyes, 
As bottom agates seem to wave and float 
In crystal currents of clear morning seas." 

The lyric, " Tears, idle tears," is far beyond praise : 
once read it seems like a thing that has always ex- 
isted in the world of poetic archetypes, and has now 

1 The author of the spiteful letters was an unpublished anony- 
mous person. 



1 842-1 848 THE PRINCESS 49 

been not so much composed as discovered and re- 
vealed. The many pictures and similitudes in The 
Princess have a magical gorgeousness : — 

" From the illumined hall 
Long lanes of splendour slanted o'er a press 
Of snowy shoulders, thick as herded ewes, 
And rainbow robes, and gems and gem-like eyes, 
And gold and golden heads ; they to and fro 
Fluctuated, as flowers in storm, some red, some pale." 

The " small sweet Idyll " from 

" A volume of the poets of her land " 

is pure Theocritus. It has been admirably rendered 
into Greek by Mr. Gilbert Murray. The exquisite 
beauties of style are not less exquisitely blended in 
the confusions of a dream, for a dream is the thing 
most akin to The Princess. Time does not exist in 
the realm of Gama, or in the ideal university of Ida. 
We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier 
pillar from a golden and learned South. The arts, 
from architecture to miniature painting, are in their 
highest perfection, while knights still tourney in 
armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as 
in the gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de 
la Zouche. Such confusions are purposefully dream- 
like : the vision being a composite thing, as dreams 
are, haunted by the modern scene of the holiday in 
the park, the "gallant glorious chronicle," the Abbey, 
and that "old crusading knight austere," Sir Ralph. 
The seven narrators of the scheme are like the " split 



50 TENNYSON 

personalities " of dreams, and the whole scheme is of 
great technical skill. The earlier editions lacked the 
beautiful songs of the ladies, and that additional trait 
of dream, the strange trance-like seizures of the 
Prince : " fallings from us, vanishings," in Words- 
worthian phrase; instances of "dissociation," in 
modern psychological terminology. Tennyson him- 
self, like Shelley and Wordsworth, had experience of 
this kind of dreaming awake which he attributes to 
his Prince, to strengthen the shadowy yet brilliant 
character of his romance. It is a thing of normal 
and natural points de repere ; of daylight suggestion, 
touched as with the magnifying and intensifying 
elements of haschish-begotten phantasmagoria. In 
the same way opium raised into the region of bril- 
liant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge 
was reading before he dreamed Kubla Khan. But in 
Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and 
secured. 

One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says 
nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for 
The Princess was the opening of Love's Labour s Lost. 
Here the King of Navarre devises the College of 
Recluses, which is broken up by the arrival of the 
Princess of France, Rosaline, and the other ladies : — 

King. Our Court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in living art. 
You three, Biron, Dumain, and Longaville, 
Have sworn for three years' term to live with me, 
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes. 



1842-1848— THE PRINCESS 5 I 

Biro?i. That is, to live and study here three years. 
But there are other strict observances ; 
As, not to see a woman in that term. 

^ ^ >k ^ # 

" That no woman shall come within a mile of my Court." 
Hath this been proclaimed ? 
Long. Four days ago. 

Biron. Let's see the penalty. " On pain of losing 
her tongue." 

The Princess then arrives with her ladies, as the 
Prince does with Cyril and Florian, as Charles did, 
with Buckingham, in Spain. The conclusion of 
Shakespeare is Tennyson's conclusion — 

** We cannot cross the cause why we are born." 

The later poet reverses the attitude of the sexes in 
Love's Labour s Lost : it is the women who make and 
break the vow; and the women in The Princess insist 
on the "grand, epic, homicidal" scenes, while the 
men are debarred, more or less, from a sportive treat- 
ment of the subject. The tavern catch of Cyril ; the 
laughable pursuit of the Prince by the feminine Proc- 
tors ; the draggled appearance of the adventurers in 
female garb, are concessions to the humour of the 
situation. Shakespeare would certainly have given 
us the song of Cyril at the picnic, and comic enough 
the effect would have been on the stage. It may be 
a gross employment, but The Princess, with the pretty 
chorus of girl undergraduates, 

" In colours gayer than the morning mist," 



52 TENNYSON 

went reasonably well in opera. Merely considered 
as a romantic fiction The Princess presents higher 
proofs of original narrative genius than any other such 
attempt by its author. 

The poem is far from being deficient in that human 
interest which Shelley said that it was as vain to ask 
from him, as to seek to buy a leg of mutton at a gin- 
shop. The characters, the protagonists, with Cyril, 
Melissa, Lady Blanche, the child Aglaia, King Gama, 
the other King, Arac, and the hero's mother — beauti- 
fully studied from the mother of the poet — are all 
sufficiently human. But they seem to waver in the 
magic air, "as all the golden autumn woodland reels " 
athwart the fires of autumn leaves. For these rea- 
sons, and because of the designed fantasy of the whole 
composition, The Princess is essentially a poem for 
the true lovers of poetry, of Spenser and of Coleridge. 
The serious motive, the question of Woman, her 
wrongs, her rights, her education, her capabilities, 
was not "in the air" in 1847. To be sure it had 
often been " in the air." The Alexandrian Plato- 
nists, the Renaissance, even the age of Anne, had 
their emancipated and learned ladies. Early Greece 
had Sappho, Corinna, and Erinna, the first the chief 
of lyric poets, even in her fragments, the two others 
applauded by all Hellas. The French Revolution 
had begotten Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her 
Vindication of the Rights of Women, and in France 
George Sand was prominent and emancipated enough 
while the poet wrote. But, the question of love 
apart, George Sand was " very, very woman," shining 



1842-1848 THE PRINCESS 53 

as a domestic character and fond of needlework. 
England was not excited about the question which 
has since produced so many disputants, inevitably 
shrill, and has not been greatly meddled with by 
women of genius, George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant. 
The poem, in the public indifference as to feminine 
education, came rather prematurely. We have now 
ladies' colleges, not in haunts remote from man, but 
by the sedged banks of Cam and Cherwell. There 
have been no revolutionary results : no boys have 
spied these chaste nests, with echoing romantic con- 
sequences. The beauty and splendour of the 
Princess's university have not arisen in light and 
colour, and it is only at St. Andrews that girls wear 
the academic and becoming costume of the scarlet 
gown. The real is far below the ideal, but the real 
in 1847 seemed eminently remote, or even impossible. 
The learned Princess herself was not on our level 
as to knowledge and the past of womankind. She 
knew not of their masterly position in the law of an- 
cient Egypt. Gynaecocracy and matriarchy, the 
woman the head of the savage or prehistoric group, 
were things hidden from her. She " glanced at the 
Lycian custom," but not at the Pictish, a custom 
which would have suited George Sand to a marvel. 
She maligned the Hottentots. 

"The highest is the measure of the man, 
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay." 

The Hottentots had long ago anticipated the Princess 
and her shrill modern sisterhood. If we take the 



54 TENNYSON 

Greeks, or even ourselves, we may say, with Dampier 
(1689), "The Hodmadods, though a nasty people, 
yet are gentlemen to these " as regards the position 
of women. Let us hear Mr. Hartland : " In every 
Hottentot's house the wife is supreme. Her husband, 
poor fellow, though he may wield wide power and in- 
fluence out of doors, at home dare not even take a 
mouthful of sour-milk out of the household vat with- 
out her permission. . . . The highest oath a 
man can take is to swear by his eldest sister, and if 
he abuses this name he forfeits to her his finest goods 
and sheep." 

However, in 1847 England had not yet thought of 
imitating the Hodmadods. Consequently, and by 
reason of the purely literary and elaborately fantastical 
character of The Princess, it was not of a nature to 
increase the poet's fame and success. " My book is 
out, and I hate it, and so no doubt will you," Tenny- 
son wrote to FitzGerald, who hated it and said so. 
"Like Carlyle, I gave up all hopes of him after The 
Princess ; " indeed it was not apt to conciliate Car- 
lyle. "None of the songs had the old champagne 
flavour," said Fitz ; and Lord Tennyson adds, 
" Nothing either by Thackeray or by my father met 
FitzGerald's approbation unless he had first seen it in 
manuscript." This prejudice was very human. Lord 
Tennyson remarks, as to the poet's meaning in this 
work, born too early, that " the sooner woman finds 
out, before the great educational movement begins, 
that 'woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse,' 
the better it will be for the progress of the world." 



1842-1848 THE PRINCESS 55 

But probably the "educational movement" will not 
make much difference to womankind on the whole. 
The old Platonic remark that woman " does the same 
things as man, but not so well," will eternally hold 
good, at least in the arts, and in letters, except in 
rare cases of genius. A new Jeanne d'Arc, the most 
signal example of absolute genius in history, will not 
come again ; and the ages have waited vainly for a new 
Sappho or a new Jane Austen. Literature, poetry, 
painting, have always been fields open to woman. 
But two names exhaust the roll of women of the 
highest rank in letters — Sappho and Jane Austen. 
And " when did woman ever yet invent ? " In " arts 
of government" Elizabeth had courage, and just sa- 
ving sense enough to yield to Cecil at the eleventh 
hour, and escape the fate of " her sister and her foe," 
the beautiful unhappy queen who told her ladies that 
she dared to look on whatever men dared to do, and 
herself would do it if her strength so served her." 1 
"The foundress of the Babylonian walls" is a myth; 
"the Rhodope that built the Pyramid" is not a 
creditable myth ; for exceptions to Knox's " Mon- 
strous Regiment of Women," we must fall back on 
" The Palmyrene that fought Aurelian," and the 
revered name of the greatest of English queens, 
Victoria. Thus history does not encourage the hope 
that a man-like education will raise many women to 
the level of the highest of their sex in the past, or 
even that the enormous majority of women will take 
advantage of the opportunity of a man-like educa- 
iThe Lennox MSS. 



56 TENNYSON 

tion. A glance at the numerous periodicals designed 
for the reading of women depresses optimism, and the 
Princess's prophecy of 

" Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss 
Of science, and the secrets of the mind," 

is not near fulfilment. Fortunately the sex does not 
"love the Metaphysics," and perhaps has not yet pro- 
duced even a manual of Logic. It must suffice man 
and woman to 

" Walk this world 
Yoked in all exercise of noble end," 

of a more practical character, while woman is at 
liberty 

" To live and learn and be 
All that not harms distinctive womanhood." 

This was the conclusion of the poet who had the 
most chivalrous reverence for womanhood. This is 
the eirenicon of that old strife between the women 
and the men ; that war in which both armies are 
captured. It may not be acceptable to excited lady 
combatants, who think man their foe, when the real 
enemy is (what Porson damned) the Nature of 
Things. 

A new poem like The Princess would soon reach the 
public of our day, so greatly increased are the uses of 
advertisement. But The Princess moved slowly from 
edition to revised and improved edition, bringing 



1842-1848 THE PRINCESS 57 

neither money nor much increase of fame. The 
poet was living with his family at Cheltenham, where 
among his new acquaintances were Sydney Dobell, 
the poet of a few exquisite pieces, and F. W. Rob- 
ertson, later so popular as a preacher at Brighton. 
Meeting him for the first time, and knowing Robert- 
son's u wish to pluck the heart from my mystery, 
from pure nervousness I would only talk of beer." 
This kind of shyness beset Tennyson. A lady tells 
me that as a girl (and a very beautiful girl) she and 
her sister, and a third, nee diversa, met the poet, and 
expected high discourse. But his speech was all of 
that wingless insect which "gets there, all the same," 
according to an American lyrist ; the insect which 
fills Mrs. Carlyle's letters with bulletins of her suc- 
cess or failure in domestic campaigns. 

Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw 
Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath 
House he was too modest to be introduced to the 
great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. 
Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically as- 
sured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, 
that " you are the one who will live." To that end, 
humanly speaking, he placed himself under the cele- 
brated Dr. Gully and his " water-cure," a foible of 
that period. In 1848 he made a tour to King 
Arthur's Cornish bounds, and another to Scotland, 
where the Pass of Brander disappointed him: per- 
haps he saw it on a fine day, and, like Glencoe, it 
needs tempest and mist lit up by the white fires of 
many waterfalls. By bonny Doon he " fell into a pas- 



58 TENNYSON 

sion of tears," for he had all of Keats's sentiment for 
Burns : " There never was immortal poet if he be 
not one." Of all English poets, the warmest in the 
praise of Burns have been the two most unlike him- 
self — Tennyson and Keats. It was the songs that 
Tennyson preferred ; Wordsworth liked the Cotter's 
Saturday Night. 



IN ME MORI AM 

In May, 1850, a few copies of In Memoriam were 
printed for friends, and presently the poem was pub- 
lished without the author's name. The pieces had 
been composed at intervals, from 1833 onwards. It is 
to be observed that the " section about evolution " was 
written some years before 1844, when the ingenious 
hypotheses of Robert Chambers, in Vestiges of Cre- 
ation, were given to the world, and caused a good deal 
of talk. Ten years, again, after In Memoriam, came 
Darwin's Origin of Species. These dates are worth 
observing. The theory of evolution, of course in a 
rude mythical shape, is at least as old as the theory of 
creation, and is found among the speculations of the 
most backward savages. The Arunta of Central 
Australia, a race remote from the polite, have a hypoth- 
esis of evolution which postulates only a few rudi- 
mentary forms of life, a marine environment, and the 
minimum of supernormal assistance in the way of 
stimulating the primal forms in the direction of more 
highly differentiated developments. " The rudi- 
mentary forms, Inapertwa, were in reality stages in 
the transformation of various plants and animals into 
human beings. . . . They had no distinct limbs 
or organs of sight, hearing, or smell." They existed 

59 



60 TENNYSON 

in a kind of lumps, and were set free from the cauls 
which enveloped them by two beings called Ungam- 
bikula, "a word which means, 'out of nothing,' or 
' self-existing.' Men descend from lower animals 
thus evolved." 1 

This example of the doctrine of evolution in an 
early shape is only mentioned to prove that the idea 
has been familiar to the human mind from the lowest 
known stage of culture. Not less familiar has been 
the theory of creaton by a kind of supreme being. 
The notion of creation, however, up to i860, held the 
foremost place in modern European belief. But La- 
marck, the elder Darwin, Monboddo, and others had 
submitted hypotheses of evolution. Now it was part 
of the originality of Tennyson, as a philosophic poet, 
that he had brooded from boyhood on these early theo- 
ries of evolution, in an age when they were practically 
unknown to the literary, and were not patronised by 
the scientific world. In November, 1844, he wrote 
to Mr. Moxon, " I want you to get me a book which 
I see advertised in the Examiner : it seems to contain 
many speculations with which I have been familiar 
for years, and on which I have written more than one 
poem." This book was Vestiges of Creation. These 
poems are the stanzas in In Memoriam about "the 
greater ape," and about Nature as careless of the type : 
" all shall go." The poetic and philosophic original- 
ity of Tennyson thus faced the popular inferences as 
to the effect of the doctrine of evolution upon religious 



389- 



IN MEMORIAM 6 1 

beliefs long before the world was moved in all its 
deeps by Darwin's Origin of Species. Thus the geo- 
logical record is inconsistent, we learned, with the 
record of the first chapters of Genesis. If a man is a 
differentiated monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, 
or future life (which is taken for granted), where are 
man's title-deeds to these possessions ? With other 
difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented them- 
selves to the poet with renewed force when his only 
chance of happiness depended on being able to believe 
in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. 
Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in 
the Rig Veda. In the early eighteenth century, in 
the age of Swift — 

" Men proved, as sure as God's in Gloucester, 
That Moses was a great impostor." 

This distrust of Moses increased with the increase of 
hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, be- 
fore Tennyson, ever attempted " to lay the spectres 
of the mind " ; ever faced world-old problems in their 
most recent aspects ? I am not acquainted with any 
poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may 
think of Tennyson's success, I do not see how we can 
deny his originality. 

Mr. Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither 
" the theology nor the philosophy of In Memoriam are 
new, original, with an independent force and depth of 
their own." " They are exquisitely graceful re-state- 
ments of the theology of the Broad Churchman of 
the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett — a combina- 



62 TENNYSON 

tion of Maurice's somewhat illogical piety with 
Jowett's philosophy of mystification." The piety of 
Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is 
logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol 
may be whatever Mr. Harrison pleases to call it. But 
as Jowett's earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan 
religion) is of 1855,0116 does not see how it could in- 
fluence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the 
Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years 
before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr. Harri- 
son refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His 
philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tenny- 
son's In Memoriam, must have been set forth by him 
at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr. 
Harrison's sentence is, " But does In Memoriam teach 
anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about 
that time" (the time of writing was mainly 1833- 
1840) "common form with F. D. Maurice, with 
Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, 
Mr. Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops West- 
cott and Boyd Carpenter ? " 

The dates answer Mr. Harrison. Jowett did not 
publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tenny- 
son wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr. 
Boyd Carpenter's works previous to 1840 are un- 
known to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a 
young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin had not pub- 
lished the first volume off Modern Painters. His Ox- 
ford prize poem is of 1839. Mr. Stopford Brooke 
was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being pri- 
vately educated ; and so with the rest, except the con- 



IN MEMORIAM 63 

temporary Maurice. How can Mr. Harrison say that, 
in the time of In Memoriam, Tennyson was u in 
touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, 
Darwin, and Tyndall " ? * When Tennyson wrote 
the parts of In Memoriam which deal with science, 
nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of 
Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not de- 
veloped, much less had they published, their "general 
ideas." Even in his journal of the Cruise of the 
Beagle Darwin's ideas were religious, and he naively 
admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr. 
Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of 
Tennyson's want of originality, on what seems to be 
an historical error. He cites parts of In Memoria?n, 
and remarks, " No one can deny that all this is ex- 
quisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have 
never been clad in such inimitable grace. 
But the train of thought is essentially that with which 
ordinary English readers have been made familiar by 
F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, Ecce Homo, Hypatia, 
and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr. Drummond, and 
many valiant companies of Septem [why Septem ?~\ 
contra Diabo/um." One must keep repeating the his- 
torical verity that the ideas of In Memoriam could not 
have been " made familiar by " authors who had not 
yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of 
and unborn, such as Ecce Homo and Jowett's work 
on some of St. Paul's Epistles. If these books con- 
tain the ideas of In Memoriam, it is by dint of repeti- 
tion and borrowing from In Memoriam, or by coinci- 
1 Tennyson, Darwin , and Mill, pp. II, 12. 



64 TENNYSON 

dence. The originality was Tennyson's ; for we 
cannot dispute the evidence of dates. 

When one speaks of "originality" one does not 
mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the 
ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828-1830) 
he had voted "No" in answer to the question dis- 
cussed by "the Apostles," "Is an intelligible [intelli- 
gent ?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena 
of the universe ? " 1 He had also propounded the 
theory that " the development of the human body 
might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular 
molluscous and vertebrate organisms," thirty years be- 
fore Darwin published The Origin of Species. To be 
concerned so early with such hypotheses, and to face, 
in poetry, the religious or irreligious inferences which 
may be drawn from them, decidedly constitutes part 
of the poetic originality of Tennyson. His attitude, 
as a poet, towards religious doubt is only so far not 
original, as it is part of the general reaction from the 
freethinking of the eighteenth century. Men had 
then been freethinkers avec d'elices. It was a joyous 
thing to be an atheist, or something very like one; at 
all events, it was glorious to be " emancipated." 
Many still find it glorious, as we read in the tone of 
Mr. Huxley, when he triumphs and tramples over 
pious dukes and bishops. Shelley said that a certain 
schoolgirl " would make a dear little atheist." But 
by 1828-1830 men were less joyous in their escape 
from all that had hitherto consoled and fortified hu- 
manity. Long before he dreamed of In Memoriam, in 
1Z ^P- 37, 1899. 



IN MEMORIAM 65 

the Poems chiefly Lyrical of 1830 Tennyson had 
written — 

" « Yet,' said I, in my morn of youth, 
The unsunn'd freshness of my strength, 
When I went forth in quest of truth, 
' It is man's privilege to doubt.' 

Ay me ! I fear 
All may not doubt, but everywhere 
Some must clasp Idols. Yet, my God, 
Whom call I Idol ? Let Thy dove 
Shadow me over, and my sins 
Be unremember'd, and Thy love 
Enlighten me. Oh teach me yet 
Somewhat before the heavy clod 
Weighs on me, and the busy fret 
Of that sharp-headed worm begins 
In the gross blackness underneath. 

Oh weary life ! oh weary death ! 
Oh spirit and heart made desolate ! 
Oh damned vacillating state ! " 

Now the philosophy of In Memoriam may be, in- 
deed is, regarded by robust, first-rate, and far from 
sensitive minds, as a " damned vacillating state." 
The poet is not so imbued with the spirit of popular 
science as to be sure that he knows everything : 
knows that there is nothing but atoms and ether, with 
no room for God or a soul. He is far from that 
happy cock-certainty, and consequently is exposed to 
the contempt of the cock-certain. The poem, says 
Mr. Harrison, " has made Tennyson the idol of the 



66 TENNYSON 

Anglican clergyman — the world in which he was born 
and the world in which his life was ideally past — the 
idol of all cultured youth and of all aesthetic women. 
It is an honourable post to fill " — that of idol. "The 
argument of In Memoriam apparently is 
that we should faintly trust the larger hope." That, 
I think, is not the argument, not the conclusion of 
the poem, but is a casual expression of one mood 
among many moods. 

The argument and conclusion of In Memoriam are 
the argument and conclusion of the life of Tennyson, 
and of the love of Tennyson, that immortal passion 
which was a part of himself, and which, if aught of 
us endure, is living yet, and must live eternally. 
From the record of his Life by his son we know that 
his trust in " the larger hope " was not " faint," but 
strengthened with the years. There are said to have 
been less hopeful intervals. 

His faith is, of course, no argument for others, at 
least it ought not to be. We are all the creatures of 
our bias, our environment, our experience, our emo- 
tions. The experience of Tennyson was unlike the 
experience of most men. It yielded him subjective 
grounds for belief. He "opened a path unto many," 
like Yama, the Vedic being who discovered the way 
to death. But Tennyson's path led not to death, but 
to life spiritual, and to hope, and he did "give a new 
impulse to the thought of his age," as other great 
poets have done. Of course it may be an impulse to 
wrong thought. As the philosophical Australian 
black said, " We shall know when we are dead." 



IN MEMORIAM 67 

Mr. Harrison argues as if, unlike Tennyson, Byron, 
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Burns produced " original 
ideas fresh from their own spirit, and not derived from 
contemporary thinkers." I do not know what orig- 
inal ideas these great poets discovered and promul- 
gated ; their ideas seem to have been " in the air." 
These poets "made them current coin." Shelley 
thought that he owed many of his ideas to Godwin, 
a contemporary thinker. Wordsworth has a debt to 
Plato, a thinker not contemporary. Burns's demo- 
cratic independence was " in the air," and had been, 
in Scotland, since Elder remarked on it in a letter to 
Ingles in 15 15. It is not the ideas, it is the expres- 
sion of the ideas that marks the poet. Tennyson's 
ideas are relatively novel, though as old as Plotinus, 
for they are applied to a novel, or at least an un- 
familiar, mental situation. Doubt was abroad, as 
it always is; but, for perhaps the first time since 
Porphyry wrote his letter to Abammon, the doubters 
desired to believe, and said, " Lord, help Thou my 
unbelief." To robust, not sensitive minds, very much 
in unity with themselves, the attitude seems con- 
temptible, or at best decently futile. Yet I cannot 
think it below the dignity of mankind, conscious that 
it is not omniscient. The poet does fail in logic {In 
Memoriam, cxx) when he says — 

" Let him, the wiser man who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood shape 
His action like the greater ape, 
But I was born to other things." 



68 TENNYSON 

I am not well acquainted with the habits of the 
greater ape, but it would probably be unwise, and per- 
haps indecent, to imitate him, even if " we also are 
his offspring." We might as well revert to polyandry 
and paint, because our Celtic or Pictish ancestors, if 
we had any, practised the one and wore the other. 
However, petulances like the verse on the greater 
ape are rare in In Memoriam. To declare that " I 
would not stay " in life if science proves us to be 
" cunning casts in clay," is beneath the courage of 
the Stoical philosophy. 

Theologically, the poem represents the struggle 
with doubts and hopes and fears, which had been with 
Tennyson from his boyhood, as is proved by the 
volume of 1830. But the doubts had exerted, prob- 
ably, but little influence on his happiness till the 
sudden stroke of loss made life for a time seem almost 
unbearable unless the doubts were solved. They 
were solved, or stoically set aside, in the Ulysses, 
written in the freshness of grief, with the conclusion, 
that we must be 

" Strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

But the gnawing of grief till it becomes a physical 
pain, the fever fits of sorrow, the aching desidcrium, 
bring back in many guises the old questions. These 
require new attempts at answers, and are answered, 
" the sad mechanic exercise " of verse allaying the 
pain. This is the genesis of /;/ Memoriam, not 
originally written for publication but produced at last 



IN MEMORIAM 69 

as a monument to friendship, and as a book of con- 
solation. 

No books of consolation can console except by 
sympathy ; and in In Memoriam sympathy and relief 
have been found, and will be found, by many. An- 
other, we feel, has trodden our dark and stony path, 
has been shadowed by the shapes of dread which 
haunt our valley of tribulation : a mind almost in- 
finitely greater than ours has been our fellow-sufferer. 
He has emerged from the darkness of the shadow of 
death into the light, whither, as it seems to us, we 
can scarcely hope to come. It is the sympathy and 
the example, I think, not the speculations, mystical 
or scientific, which make In Memoriam, in more than 
name, a book of consolation : even in hours of the 
sharpest distress, when its technical beauties and 
wonderful pictures seem shadowy and unreal, like the 
yellow sunshine and the woods of that autumn day 
when a man learned that his friend was dead. No, 
it was not the speculations and arguments that con- 
soled or encouraged us. We did not listen to 
Tennyson as to Mr. Frederic Harrison's glorified 
Anglican clergyman. We could not murmur, like 
the Queen of the May — 

" That good man, the Laureate, has told us words of 
peace." 

What we valued was the poet's companionship. 
There was a young reader to whom All along the 
Valley came as a new poem in a time of recent 
sorrow. 



^O TENNYSON 

" The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away," 

said the singer of In Memoriam, and in that hour it 
seemed as if none could endure for two-and-thirty 
years the companionship of loss. But the years have 
gone by, and have left 

" Ever young the face that dwells 
With reason cloistered in the brain." 1 

In this way to many In Memoriam is almost a life- 
long companion : we walk with Great Heart for our 
guide through the valley Perilous. 

In this respect In Memoriam is unique, for neither 
to its praise nor dispraise is it to be compared with 
the other famous elegies of the world. These are 
brief outbursts of grief — real, as in the hopeless words 
of Catullus over his brother's tomb ; or academic, 
like Milton's Lycidas. We are not to suppose that 
Milton was heart-broken by the death of young Mr. 
King, or that Shelley was greatly desolated by the 
death of Keats, with whom his personal relations had 
been slight, and of whose poetry he had spoken evil. 
He was nobly stirred as a poet by a poet's death — like 
Mr. Swinburne by the death of Charles Baudelaire ; 
but neither Shelley nor Mr. Swinburne was lamenting 
dimidium anima sues, or mourning for a friend 

" Dear as the mother to the son, 
More than my brothers are to me." 

The passion of In Memoriam is personal, is acute, is 
1 Poem omitted from In Memoriam. Life, p. 257. 1899. 



IN MEMORIAM 7 1 

lifelong, and thus it differs from the other elegies. 
Moreover, it celebrates a noble object, and thus is un- 
like the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic, which 
informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem 
stands alone, cloistered ; not fiery with indignation, 
not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley's 
Adonais ; not capable, by reason even of its medita- 
tive metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it is 
not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim 
and plan are other than theirs. 

It is far from my purpose to " class " Tennyson, 
or to dispute about his relative greatness when com- 
pared with Wordsworth or Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, 
or Burns. He rated one song of Lovelace above all 
his lyrics, and, in fact, could no more have written the 
Cavalier's To Althea from Prison than Lovelace could 
have written the Morte a" Arthur. " It is not reason- 
able, it is not fair," says Mr. Harrison, after compar- 
ing In Memoriam with Lycidas, "to compare Tenny- 
son with Milton," and it is not reasonable to compare 
Tennyson with any poet whatever. Criticism is not 
the construction of a class list. But we may reason- 
ably say that In Memoriam is a noble poem, an original 
poem, a poem which stands alone in literature. The 
wonderful beauty, ever fresh, howsoever often read, 
of many stanzas, is not denied by any critic. The 
marvel is that the same serene certainty of art broods 
over even the stanzas which must have been con- 
ceived while the sorrow was fresh. The second 
piece, 

" Old yew, which graspest at the stones," 



J2 TENNYSON 

must have been composed soon after the stroke fell. 
Yet it is as perfect as the proem of 1849. As a ru ^ e 5 
the poetical expression of strong emotion appears 
usually to clothe the memory of passion when it has 
been softened by time. But here already " the 
rhythm, phrasing, and articulation are entirely fault- 
less, exquisitely clear, melodious, and rare." : It were 
superfluous labour to point at special beauties, at the 
exquisite rendering of nature ; and copious commen- 
taries exist to explain the course of the argument, if a 
series of moods is to be called an argument. One 
may note such a point as that (xiv) where the poet 
says that, were he to meet his friend in life, 

** I should not feel it to be strange." 

It may have happened to many to mistake, for a sec- 
tion of a second, the face of a stranger for the face 
seen only in dreams, and to find that the recognition 
brings no surprise. 

Pieces of a character apart from the rest, and placed 
in a designed sequence, are xcii, xciii, xcv. In the 
first the poet says — 

"If any vision should reveal 

Thy likeness, I might count it vain 
As but the canker of the brain ; 
Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal 

" To chances where our lots were cast 
Together in the days behind, 
I might but say, I hear a wind 
Of memory murmuring the past. 
1 Mr. Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Mill, p. 5. 



IN MEMORIAM 73 

" Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view 
A fact within the coming year ; 
And tho' the months, revolving near, 
Should prove the phantom-warning true. 

" They might not seem thy prophecies, 
But spiritual presentiments, 
And such refraction of events 
As often rises ere they rise.' , 

The author thus shows himself difficile as to recogni- 
sing the personal identity of a phantasm ; nor is it easy 
to see what mode of proving his identity would be left 
to a spirit. The poet, therefore, appeals to some per- 
haps less satisfactory experience : — 

" Descend, and touch, and enter ; hear 

The wish too strong for words to name ; 
That in this blindness of the frame 
My Ghost may feel that thine is near." 

The third poem is the crown of In Memoriam, ex- 
pressing almost such things as are not given to man 
to utter : — 

" And all at once it seem'd at last 
The living soul was flash'd on mine, 

" And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd 
About empyreal heights of thought, 
And came on that which is, and caught 
The deep pulsations of the world. 

" Ionian music measuring out 

The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance — 
The blows of Death. At length my trance 
Was cancelPd. stricken thro' with doubt. 



74 



TENNYSON 



" Vague words ! but ah, how hard to frame 
In matter-moulded forms of speech, 
Or ev'n for intellect to reach 
Thro' memory that which I became." 

Experiences like this, subjective, and not matter for 
argument, were familiar to Tennyson. Jowett said, 
" He was one of those who, though not an upholder 
of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and 
Earth were never far absent from us." In The 
Mystic, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown 
familiarity with strange psychological and psychical 
conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with 
these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy 
was tinged, and his confidence that we are more than 
" cunning casts in clay " was increased, by phenomena 
of experience, which can only be evidence for the 
mystic himself, if even for him. But this dim aspect 
of his philosophy, of course, is "to the Greeks fool- 
ishness." 

His was a philosophy of his own ; not a philosophy 
for disciples, and iC those that eddy round and round." 
It was the sum of his reflection on the mass of his 
impressions. I have shown, by the aid of dates, that 
it was not borrowed from Huxley, Mr. Stop ford 
Brooke, and the late Duke of Argyll. But, no doubt, 
many of the ideas were " in the air," and must have 
presented themselves to minds at once of religious 
tendency, and attracted by the evolutionary theories 
which had always existed as floating speculations, till 
they were made current coin by the genius and patient 



IN MEMORIAM 75 

study of Darwin. That Tennyson's opinions be- 
tween 1830 and 1840 were influenced by those of F. 
D. Maurice is reckoned probable by Canon Ainger, 
author of the notice of the poet in The Dictionary of 
National Biography. In the Life of Maurice, Tenny- 
son does not appear till 1850, and the two men were 
not at Cambridge together. But Maurice's ideas, as 
they then existed, may have reached Tennyson orally 
through Hallam and other members of the Trinity 
set, who knew personally the author of Letters to a 
®hiaker. However, this is no question of scientific 
priority : to myself it seems that Tennyson " beat his 
music out " for himself, as perhaps most people do. 
Like his own Sir Percivale, "I know not all he 
meant." 

Among the opinions as to In Memoriam current at 
the time of its publication Lord Tennyson notices 
those of Maurice and Robertson. They " thought 
that the poet had made a definite step towards the 
unification of the highest religion and philosophy with 
the progressive science of the day." Neither science 
nor religion stands still ; neither stands now where it 
then did. Conceivably they are traveling on paths 
which will ultimately coincide; but this opinion, of 
course, must seem foolishness to most professors of 
science. Bishop Westcott was at Cambridge when 
the book appeared : he is one of Mr. Harrison's pos- 
sible sources of Tennyson's ideas. He recognised 
the poet's " splendid faith (in the face of every diffi- 
culty) in the growing purpose of the sum of life, and 
in the noble destiny of the individual man." Ten 



j6 TENNYSON 

years later Professor Henry Sidgwick, a mind suffi- 
ciently sceptical, found in some lines of In Memoriam 
" the indestructible and inalienable minimum of faith 
which humanity cannot give up because it is neces- 
sary for life ; and which I know that I, at least so far 
as the man in me is deeper than the methodical 
thinker, cannot give up." But we know that many 
persons not only do not find an irreducible minimum 
of faith "necessary for life," but are highly indignant 
and contemptuous if any one else ventures to suggest 
the logical possibility of any faith at all. 

The mass of mankind will probably never be con- 
vinced unbelievers — nay, probably the backward or 
forward swing of the pendulum will touch more con- 
vinced belief. But there always have been, since the 
Rishls of India sang, superior persons who believe in 
nothing not material — whatever the material may be. 
Tennyson was, it is said, " impatient " of these exprtts 
forts, and they are impatient of him. It is an error to 
be impatient : we know not whither the logos may 
lead us, or later generations ; and we ought not to be 
irritated with others because it leads them into what 
we think the wrong path. It is unfortunate that a 
work of art, like In Memoriam, should arouse theo- 
logical or anti-theological passions. The poet only 
shows us the paths by which his mind traveled : they 
may not be the right paths, nor is it easy to trace them 
on a philosophical chart. He escaped from Doubting 
Castle. Others may " take that for a hermitage," 
and be happy enough in the residence. We are all 
determined by our bias : Tennyson's is unconcealed. 



IN MEMORIAM 77 

His poem is not a tract : it does not aim at the con- 
version of people with the contrary bias. It is 
irksome, in writing about a poet, to be obliged to dis- 
cuss a philosophy which, certainly, is not stated in the 
manner of Spinoza, but is merely the equilibrium of 
contending forces in a single mind. 

The most famous review of In Memoriam is that 
which declared that " these touching lines evidently 
come from the full heart of the widow of a military 
man." This is only equaled, if equaled, by a recent 
critique which treated a fresh edition of jfane Eyre as 
a new novel, " not without power, in parts, and show- 
ing some knowledge of Yorkshire local colour." 



VI 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 



On June 13 Tennyson married, at Shiplake, the 
object of his old, long-tried, and constant affec- 
tion. The marriage was still " imprudent," 
eight years of then uncontested supremacy in Eng- 
lish poetry had not brought a golden harvest. Mr. 
Moxon appears to have supplied ,£300 " in advance 
of royalties.'' The sum, so contemptible in the eyes 
of first-rate modern novelists, was a competence to 
Tennyson, added to his little pension and the epaves 
of his patrimony. " The peace of God came into my 
life when I married her," he said in later days. The 
poet made a charming copy of verses to his friend, 
the Rev. Mr. Rawnsley, who tied the knot, as he and 
his bride drove to the beautiful village of Pangbourne. 
Thence they went to the stately Clevedon Court, the 
seat of Sir Abraham Elton, hard by the church where 
Arthur Hallam sleeps. The place is very ancient and 
beautiful, and was a favourite haunt of Thackeray. 
They passed on to Lynton, and to Glastonbury, 
where a collateral ancestor of Mrs. Tennyson's is 
buried beside King Arthur's grave, in that green val- 
ley of Avilion, among the apple-blossoms. They 
settled for a while at Tent Lodge on Coniston Water, 
in a land of hospitable Marshalls. 
78 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 



79 



After their return to London, on the night of No- 
vember 1 8, Tennyson dreamed that Prince Albert 
came and kissed him, and that he himself said, " Very 
kind, but very German," which was very like him. 
Next day he received from Windsor the ofFer of the 
Laureateship. He doubted, and hesitated, but ac- 
cepted. Since Wordsworth's death there had, as 
usual, been a good deal of banter about the probable 
new Laureate : examples of competitive odes exist in 
Bon Gaultier. That by Tennyson is Anacreontic, but 
he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, 
as he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the 
plea of extreme old age ; but it was worthy of the 
great and good Queen not to overlook the Nestor of 
English poets. For the rest, the Oueen looked for 
" a name bearing such distinction in the literary world 
as to do credit to the appointment." In the previous 
century the great poets had rarely been Laureates. 
But since Sir Walter Scott declined the bays in favour 
of Southey, for whom, again, the tale of bricks in the 
way of Odes was lightened, and when Wordsworth 
succeeded Southey, the office became honourable. 
Tennyson gave it an increase of renown, while, 
though in itself of merely nominal value, it served his 
poems, to speak profanely, as an advertisement. 
New editions of his books were at once in demand ; 
while few readers had ever heard of Mr. Browning, 
already his friend, and already author of Men and 
Women. 

The Laureateship brought the poet acquainted with 
the Queen, who was to be his debtor in later days for 



8o TENNYSON 

encouragement and consolation. To his Laureate- 
ship we owe, among other good things, the stately and 
moving Ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington, 
a splendid heroic piece, unappreciated at the moment. 
But Tennyson was, of course, no Birthday poet. 
Since the exile of the House of Stuart our kings in 
England have not maintained the old familiarity with 
many classes of their subjects. Literature has not 
been fashionable at Court, and Tennyson could in no 
age have been a courtier. We hear the complaint, 
every now and then, that official honours are not con- 
ferred (except the Laureateship) on men of letters. 
But most of them probably think it rather distin- 
guished not to be decorated, or to carry titles borne 
by many deserving persons unvisited by the Muses. 
Even the appointment to the bays usually provokes a 
great deal of jealous and spiteful feeling, which would 
only be multiplied if official honours were distributed 
among men of the pen. Perhaps Tennyson's laurels 
were not for nothing in the chorus of dispraise which 
greeted the Ode on the Duke of Wellington, and Maud. 
The year 1851 was chiefly notable for a tour to 
Italy, made immortal in the beautiful poem of The 
Daisy, in a measure of the poet's own invention. 
The next year, following the Coup d'etat and the rise 
of the new French empire, produced patriotic appeals 
to Britons to "guard their own," which to a great 
extent former alien owners had been unsuccessful in 
guarding from Britons. The Tennysons had lost 
their first child at his birth : perhaps he is remembered 
in The Grandmother, " the babe had fought for his 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 8i 

life." In August, 1852, the present Lord Tennyson 
was born, and Mr. Maurice was asked to be god- 
father. The Wellington Ode was of November, and 
was met by " the almost universal depreciation of the 
press," — why, except because, as I have just sug- 
gested, Tennyson was Laureate, it is impossible to 
imagine. The verses were worthy of the occasion : 
more they could not be. 

In the autumn of 1853 ^ e P oet visited Ardtornish 
on the Sound of Mull, a beautiful place endeared to 
him who now writes by the earliest associations. It 
chanced to him to pass his holidays there just when 
Tennyson and Mr. Palgrave had left — " Mr. Tin- 
smith and Mr. Pancake," as Robert the boatman, a 
very black Celt, called them. Being then nine years 
of age, I heard of a poet's visit, and asked, " A real 
poet, like Sir Walter Scott ? " with whom I then sup- 
posed that u the Muse had gone away." " Oh, not 
like Sir Walter Scott, of course," my mother told 
me, with loyalty unashamed. One can think of the 
poet as Mrs. Sellar, his hostess, describes him, be- 
neath the limes of the avenue at Acharn, planted, 
Mrs. Sellar says, by a cousin of Flora Macdonald. 
I have been told that the lady who planted the lilies, 
if not the limes, was the famed Jacobite, Miss Jennie 
Cameron, mentioned in Tom Jones. An English en- 
graving of 1746 shows the Prince between these two 
beauties, Flora and Jennie. 

"No one," says Mrs. Sellar, "could have been 
more easy, simple, and delightful," and indeed it is no 
marvel that in her society and that of her husband, 



82 TENNYSON 

the Greek professor, and her cousin, Miss Cross, and 
in such scenes, " he blossomed out in the most genial 
manner, making us all feel as if he were an old 
friend." 

In November Tennyson took a house at Farring- 
ford, " as it was beautiful and far from the haunts of 
men." There he settled to a country existence in 
the society of his wife, his two children (the second, 
Lionel, being in 1854 the baby), and there he com- 
posed Maud, while the sound of the guns, in practice 
for the war of the Crimea, boomed from the coast. 
In May Tennyson saw the artists, of schools oddly 
various, who illustrated his poems. Millais, Rossetti, 
and Holman Hunt gave the tone to the art, but Mr. 
Horsley, Creswick, and Mulgrave were also engaged. 
While Maud was being composed Tennyson wrote 
The Charge of the Light Brigade ; a famous poem, 
not in a manner in which he was born to excel — at 
least in my poor opinion. " Some one had blun- 
dered," and that line was the first fashioned and the 
keynote of the poem ; but, after all, " blundered " is 
not an exquisite rhyme to " hundred." The poem, 
in any case, was most welcome to our army in the 
Crimea, and is a spirited piece for recitation. 

In January, 1855, Maud was finished ; in April the 
poet copied it out for the press, and refreshed himself 
by reading a very different poem, The Lady of the 
Lake. The author, Sir Walter, had suffered, like the 
hero of Maud, by an unhappy love affair, which just 
faintly colours The Lady of the Lake by a single 
allusion, in the description of Fitz-James's dreams : — 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 83 

" Then, — from my couch may heavenly might 
Chase that worst phantom of the night ! — 
Again returned the scenes of youth, 
Of confident undoubting truth ; 
Again his soul he interchanged 
With friends whose hearts were long estranged. 
They come, in dim procession led, 
The cold, the faithless, and the dead ; 
As warm each hand, each brow as gay, 
As if they parted yesterday. 
And doubt distracts him at the view, 
Oh were his senses false or true ! 
Dreamed he of death, or broken vow, 
Or is it all a vision now ! " 

We learn from Lady Louisa Stuart, to whom Scott 
read these lines, that they referred to his lost love. I 
cite the passage because the extreme reticence of 
Scott, in his undying sorrow, is in contrast with what 
Tennyson, after reading The Lady of the Lake, was 
putting into the mouth of his complaining lover in 
Maud. 

We have no reason to suppose that Tennyson him- 
self had ever to bewail a faithless love. To be sure 
the hero of Locksley Hall is in this attitude, but then 
Locksley Hall is not autobiographical. Less dramatic 
and impersonal in appearance are the stanzas 

" Come not, when I am dead, 

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave," 
and 

" Child, if it were thine error or thy crime 
I care no longer, being all unblest." 



84 TENNYSON 

No biographer tells us whether this was a personal 
complaint or a mere set of verses on an imaginary oc- 
casion. In In Memoriam Tennyson speaks out con- 
cerning the loss of a friend. In Maud, as in Locksley 
Hall, he makes his hero reveal the agony caused by 
the loss of a mistress. There is no reason to suppose 
that the poet had ever any such mischance, but many 
readers have taken Locksley Hall and Maud for auto- 
biographical revelations, like In Memoriam. They are, 
on the other hand, imaginative and dramatic. They 
illustrate the pangs of disappointed love of woman, 
pangs more complex and more rankling than those in- 
flicted by death. In each case, however, the poet, 
who has sung so nobly the happiness of fortunate 
wedded loves, has chosen a hero with whom we do 
not readily sympathise — a Hamlet in miniature, 

" With a heart of furious fancies," 

as in the old mad song. This choice, thanks to the 
popular misconception, did him some harm. As a 
" monodramatic Idyll," a romance in many rich lyric 
measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. 
u Tennyson's Maud is Tennyson's Maudlin," said a 
satirist, and " morbid," " mad," " rampant," and " rabid 
bloodthirstiness of soul," were among the amenities 
of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at 
least, hopes that national union in a national struggle 
will awake a nobler than the commercial spirit. Into 
the rights and wrongs of our quarrel with Russia we 
are not to go. Tennyson, rightly or wrongly, took 
the part of his country, and must "thole the feud " of 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 85 

those high-souled citizens who think their country 
always in the wrong — as perhaps it very frequently is. 
We are not to expect a tranquil absence of bias in the 
midst of military excitement, when very laudable sen- 
timents are apt to misguide men in both directions. 
In any case, political partisanship added to the ene- 
mies of the poem, which was applauded by Henry 
Taylor, Ruskin, George Brimley, and Jowett, while 
Mrs. Browning sent consoling words from Italy. The 
poem remained a favourite with the author, who chose 
passages from it often, when persuaded to read aloud 
by friends ; and modern criticism has not failed to ap- 
plaud the splendour of the verse and the subtlety of 
the mad scenes, the passion of the love lyrics. 

These merits have ceased to be disputed, but, 
though a loyal Tennysonian, I have never quite been 
able to reconcile myself to Maud as a whole. The 
hero is an unwholesome young man, and not of an 
original kind. He is un beau ten'ebreux of 1830. I 
suppose it has been observed that he is merely The 
Master of Ravenswood in modern costume, and with- 
out Lady Ashton. Her part is taken by Maud's 
brother. The situations of the hero and of the Master 
(whose acquaintance Thackeray never renewed after 
he lost his hat in the Kelpie Flow) are nearly iden- 
tical. The families and fathers of both have been 
ruined by " the gray old wolf," and by Sir William 
Ashton, representing the house of Stair. Both heroes 
live dawdling on, hard by their lost ancestral homes. 
Both fall in love with the daughters of the enemies of 
their houses. The loves of both are baffled, and end 



86 TENNYSON 

in tragedy. Both are concerned in a duel, though the 
Master, on his way to the ground, " stables his steed 
in the Kelpie Flow," and the wooer in Maud shoots 
Lucy Ashton's brother, — I mean the brother of 
Maud, — though dueling in England was out of date. 
Then comes an interval of madness, and he recovers 
amid the patriotic emotions of the ill-fated Crimean 
expedition. Both lovers are gloomy, though the 
Master has better cause, for the Tennysonian hero is 
more comfortably provided for than Edgar with his 
" man and maid," his Caleb and Mysie. Finally, 
both The Bride of Lammermoor, which affected Ten- 
nyson so potently in boyhood 

(" A merry merry bridal, 

A merry merry day "), 

and Maud, excel in passages rather than as wholes. 

The hero of Maud, with his clandestine wooing of 
a girl of sixteen, has this apology, that the match had 
been, as it were, predestined, and desired by the 
mother of the lady. Still, the brother did not ill to be 
angry ; and the peevishness of the hero against the 
brother and the parvenu lord and rival strikes a jarring 
note. In England, at least, the general sentiment is 
opposed to this moody, introspective kind of young 
man, of whom Tennyson is not to be supposed to 
approve. We do not feel certain that his man and maid 
were "ever ready to slander and steal." That seems 
to be part of his jaundiced way of looking at every- 
thing and everybody. He has even a bad word for 
the " man-god " of modern davs, 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 87 

" The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain, 
An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and 
poor." 

Rien rC est sacre for this cynic, who thinks himself a 
Stoic. Thus Maud was made to be unpopular with 
the author's countrymen, who conceived a prejudice 
against Maud's lover, described by Tennyson as " a 
morbid poetic soul, ... an egotist with the 
makings of a cynic." That he is " raised to sanity " 
(still in Tennyson's words) " by a pure and holy love 
which elevates his whole nature," the world failed to 
perceive, especially as the sanity was only a brief lucid 
interval, tempered by hanging about the garden to 
meet a girl of sixteen, unknown to her relations. 
Tennyson added that " different phases of passion in 
one person take the place of different characters," to 
which critics replied that they wanted different char- 
acters, if only by way of relief, and did not care for 
any of the phases of passion. The learned Monsieur 
Janet has maintained that love is a disease like an- 
other, and that nobody falls in love when in perfect 
health of mind and body. This theory seems open 
to exception, but the hero of Maud is unhealthy 
enough. At best and last, he only helps to give a 
martial force a " send-off" : — 

" I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath 
With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry." 

He did not go out as a volunteer, and probably the 
Crimean winters brought him back to his original es- 
tate of cynical gloom — and very naturally. 



88 TENNYSON 

The reconciliation with Life is not like the recon- 
ciliation of In Memoriam. The poem took its rise in 
old lines, and most beautiful lines, which Tennyson 
had contributed in 1837 to a miscellany : — 

" O that 'twere possible, 

After long grief and pain, 
To find the arms of my true love 
Round me once again." 

Thence the poet, working back to find the origin of 
the situation, encountered the ideas and the persons 
of Maud. 

I have tried to state the sources, in the general 
mind, of the general dislike of Maud. The public, 
" driving at practice," disapproved of the " criticism 
of life " in the poem ; confused the suffering narrator 
with the author, and neglected the poetry. " No 
modern poem," said Jowett, " contains more lines 
that ring in the ears of men. I do not know any 
verse out of Shakespeare in which the ecstasy of love 
soars to such a height." With these comments we 
may agree, yet may fail to follow Jowett when he 
says, "No poem since Shakespeare seems to show 
equal power of the same kind, or equal knowledge of 
human nature." Shakespeare could not in a narra- 
tive poem have preferred the varying passions of one 
character to the characters of many persons. 

Tennyson was " nettled at first," his son says, " by 
these captious remarks of the c indolent reviewers,' 
but afterwards he would take no notice of them ex- 
cept to speak of them in a half-pitiful, half-humorous, 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 89 

half-mournful manner." The besetting sin and error 
of the critics was, of course, to confound Tennyson's 
hero with himself, as if we confused Dickens with 

pip. 

Like Aurora Leigh, Lucile, and other works, Maud 
is under the disadvantage of being, practically, a novel 
of modern life in verse. Criticised as a tale of mod- 
ern life (and it was criticised in that character), it 
could not be very highly esteemed. But the essence 
of Maud, of course, lies in the poetical vehicle. No- 
body can cavil at the impressiveness of the opening 
stanzas — 

" I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood " ; 

with the keynotes of colour and of desolation struck ; 
the lips of the hollow " dabbled with blood-red heath," 
the " red-ribb'd ledges," and " the flying gold of the 
ruin'd woodlands " ; and the contrast in the picture 
of the child Maud — 

" Maud the delight of the village, the ringing joy 
of the Hall." 

The poem abounds in lines which live in the memory, 
as in the vernal description — 

" A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime " ; 

and the voice heard in the garden singing 

" A passionate ballad gallant and gay," 

as Lovelace's Althea ; and the lines on the far-ofF 



90 TENNYSON 

waving of a white hand, " betwixt the cloud and the 
moon." The lyric of 

" Birds in the high Hall-garden 
When twilight was falling, 
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, 
They were crying and calling," 

was a favourite of the poet. 

"What birds were these ? " he is said to have asked 
a lady suddenly, when reading to a silent company. 

" Nightingales," suggested a listener, who did not 
probably remember any other fowl that is vocal in 
the dusk. 

" No, they were rooks," answered the poet. 

" Come into the Garden, Maud," is as fine a love- 
song as Tennyson ever wrote, with a triumphant 
ring, and a soaring exultant note. Then the poem 
drops from its height, like a lark shot high in heaven ; 
tragedy comes, and remorse, and the beautiful inter- 
lude of the 

" lovely shell, 
Small and pure as a pearl." 

Then follows the exquisite 

" O that 'twere possible," 

and the dull consciousness of the poem of madness, 
with its dumb gnawing confusion of pain and wan- 
dering memory ; the hero being finally left, in the 
author's words, " sane but shattered." 

Tennyson's letters of the time show that the critics 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 9 1 

succeeded in wounding him : it was not a difficult 
thing to do. Maud was threatened with a broadside 
from "that pompholygous, broad-blown Apollodorus, 
the gifted X." People who have read Aytoun's di- 
verting Firmilian, where Apollodorus plays his part, 
and who remember " gifted Gilfillan " in Waverley, 
know who the gifted X. was. But X. was no great 
authority south of Tay. 

Despite the almost unanimous condemnation by 
public critics, the success of Maud enabled Tenny- 
son to buy Farringford, so he must have been better 
appreciated and understood by the world than by the 
reviewers. 

In February, 1850, Tennyson returned to his old 
Arthurian themes, " the only big thing not done," for 
Milton had merely glanced at Arthur, Dryden did not 

** Raise the Table Round again," 

and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate. 
Vivien was first composed as Merlin and Nimue, and 
then Geraint and Enid was adapted from the Mabin- 
ogion, the Welsh collection of M'drchen and legends, 
things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or 
Brythonic, now amplifications made under the influ- 
ence of mediaeval French romance. Enid was fin- 
ished in Wales in August, and Tennyson learned 
Welsh enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, 
which is much more of Welsh than many Arthurian 
critics possess. The two first Idylls were privately 
printed in the summer of 1857, Dem g very rare and 
much desired of collectors in this embryonic shape. 



92 TENNYSON 

In July Guinevere was begun, in the middle, with 
Arthur's valedictory address to his erring consort. 
In autumn Tennyson visited the late Duke of Argyll 
at Inveraray : he was much attached to the Duke — 
unlike Professer Huxley. Their love of nature, the 
Duke being as keen-eyed as the poet was short- 
sighted, was one tie of union. The Indian Mutiny, 
or at least the death of Havelock, was the occasion 
of lines which the author was too wise to include in 
any of his volumes : the poem on Lucknow was of 
later composition. 

Guinevere was completed in March, 1858; and 
Tennyson met Mr. Swinburne, then very young. 
" What I particularly admired in him was that he did 
not press upon me any verses of his own." Tenny- 
son would have found more to admire if he had 
pressed for a sight of the verses. Neither he nor Mr. 
Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young 
poets : they had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson. 
But both were kept in a perpetual state of apprehen- 
sion by the army of versifiers who send volumes by 
post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson 
did say to one of them, " As an amusement to your- 
self and your friends, the writing it " (verse) " is all 
very well." It is the friends who do not find it 
amusing, while the stranger becomes the foe. The 
psychology of these pests of the Muses is bewilder- 
ing. They do not seem to read poetry, only to write 
it and launch it at unoffending strangers. If they 
bought each other's books, all of them could afford to 
publish. 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 



93 



The Master of Balliol, the most adviceful man, if 
one may use the term, of his age, appears to have ad- 
vised Tennyson to publish the Idylls at once. There 
had been years of silence since Maud, and the Master 
suspected that " mosquitoes " (reviewers) were the 
cause. " There is a note needed to show the good 
side of human nature and to condone its frailties 
which Thackeray will never strike." To others it 
seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note : 
at that time in General Lambert, his wife, and daugh- 
ters, not to speak of other characters in The Virgin- 
ians. Who does not condone the frailties of Captain 
Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong ? Jn 
any case, Tennyson took his own time, he was (1858) 
only beginning Elaine. There is no doubt that 
Tennyson was easily pricked by unsympathetic criti- 
cism, even from the most insignificant source, and, as 
he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise. 
All authors, without exception, are sensitive. A 
sturdier author wrote that he would sometimes have 
been glad to meet his assailant " where the muir-cock 
was bailie." We know how testily Wordsworth re- 
plied in defense to the gentlest comments by Lamb. 

The Master of Balliol kept insisting, "As to the 
critics, their power is not really great. . . . One 
drop of natural feeling in poetry or the true statement 
of a single new fact is already felt to be of more 
value than all the critics put together." Yet even 
critics may be in the right, and of all great poets, 
Tennyson listened most obediently to their censures, 
as we have seen in the case of his early poems. His 



94 TENNYSON 

prolonged silences after the attacks of 1833 and 1855 
were occupied in work and reflection : Achilles was 
not merely sulking in his tent, as some of his friends 
seem to have supposed. An epic in a series of epic 
idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in 
rhyme ; and Tennyson's method was always one of 
waiting for maturity of conception and execution. 

Mrs. Tennyson, doubtless by her lord's desire, 
asked the Master (then tutor of Balliol) to suggest 
themes. Old age was suggested, and is treated in 
The Grandmother. Other topics were not handled. 
" I hold most strongly," said the Master, " that it is 
the duty of every one who has the good fortune to 
know a man of genius to do any trifling service they 
can to lighten his work." To do every service in his 
power to every man was the Master's lifelong prac- 
tice. He was not much at home, his letters show, 
with Burns, to whom he seems to have attributed 
John Anderson, my jo, John, while he tells an anecdote 
of Burns composing Tarn Shanter with emotional 
tears, which, if true at all, is true of the making of 
To Mary in Heaven. If Burns wept over Tarn o y 
Shanter, the tears must have been tears of laughter. 

The first four Idylls of the King were prepared for 
publication in the spring of 1859; while Tennyson 
was at work also on Pelleas and Ettarre, and the 
Tristram cycle. In autumn he went on a tour to 
Lisbon with Mr. F. T. Palgrave and Mr. Craufurd 
Grove. Returning, he fell eagerly to reading an early 
copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, the crown of his 
own early speculations on the theory of evolution. 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 95 

"Your theory does not make against Christianity?" 
he asked Darwin later (1868), who replied, "No, 
certainly not." But Darwin has stated the waverings 
of his own mind in contact with a topic too high for 
a priori reasoning, and only to be approached, if at 
all, on the strength of the scientific method applied to 
facts which science, so far, neglects, or denies, or 
" explains away," rather than explains. 

The Idylls, unlike Maud, were well received by the 
press, better by the public, and best of all by friends 
like Thackeray, the Duke of Argyll, the Master of 
Balliol, and Clough, while Ruskin shewed some re- 
serve. The letter from Thackeray I cannot deny 
myself the pleasure of citing from the Biography ; it 
was written " in an ardour of claret and gratitude," 
but posted some six weeks later : — 

Folkestone, September. 
36 Onslow Square, October. 

My dear Old Alfred, — I owe you a letter of happiness 
and thanks. Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in 
bed, I read the Idylls of the King, and I thought, " Oh I 
must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, this 
splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying." But 
I should have blotted the sheets, 'tis ill writing on one's back. 
The letter full of gratitude never went as far as the post- 
office and how comes it now ? 

D'abord, a bottle of claret. (The landlord of the hotel 
asked me down to the cellar and treated me.) Then after- 
wards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser's Magazine, 
1850, and I come on a poem out of The Princess which 
says " I hear the horns of Elfland blowing, blowing," no, 



96 TENNYSON 

it's " the horns of Elfland faintly blowing " (I have been into 
my bedroom to fetch my pen and it has made that blot), 
and, reading the lines, which only one man in the world 
could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blow- 
ing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guine- 
vere in gold hair, and all those knights and heroes and beau- 
ties and purple landscapes and misty gray lakes in which you 
have made me live. They seem like facts to me, since about 
three weeks ago (three weeks or a month was it ?) when I 
read the book. It is on the table yonder, and I don't like, 
somehow, to disturb it, but the delight and gratitude ! You 
have made me as happy as I was as a child with the Arabian 
Nights, every step I have walked in Elfland has been a sort 
of Paradise to me. (The landlord gave two bottles of his 
claret and I think I drank the most) and here I have been 
lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful 
Idylls, my thoughts being turned to you : what could I do 
but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me 
so happy ? Do you understand that what I mean is all true 
and that I should break out were you sitting opposite with a 
pipe in your mouth ? Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, 
gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you 
haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour 
of gratitude ? But I have had out of that dear book the 
greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young 
man ; to write and think about it makes me almost young, 
and this I suppose is what I'm doing, like an after-dinner 
speech. 

P. S — I thought the " Grandmother " quite as fine. 
How can you at 50 be doing things as well as at 35 ? 

October 16th. — (I should think six weeks after the wri- 
ting of the above.) 



AFTER IN MEMORIAM 97 

The rhapsody of gratitude was never sent, and for a pe- 
culiar reason ; just about the time of writing I came to an 
arrangement with Smith & Elder to edit their new magazine, 
and to have a contribution from T. was the publishers' and 
editor's highest ambition. But to ask a man for a favour, 
and to praise and bow down before him in the same page 
seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and 
left this note in my desk, where it has been lying during a 
little French-Italian-Swiss tour which my girls and their papa 
have been making. 

Meanwhile S. E. & Co. have been making their own pro- 
posals to you, and you have replied not favourably I am 
sorry to hear ; but now there is no reason why you should 
not have my homages, and I am just as thankful for the 
Idylls, and love and admire them just as much, as I did two 
months ago when I began to write in that ardour of claret 
and gratitude. If you can't write for us you can't. If you 
can by chance some day, and help an old friend, how 
pleased and happy I shall be ! This however must be left 
to fate and your convenience : I don't intend to give up 
hope, but accept the good fortune if it comes. I see one, 
two, three quarterlies advertised to-day, as all bringing 
laurels to laureatus. He will not refuse the private tribute 
of an old friend, will he ? You don't know how pleased the 
girls were at Kensington t'other day to hear you quote their 
father's little verses, and he too I dare say was not disgusted. 
He sends you and yours his very best regards in this most 
heartfelt and artless 

(note of admiration) ! 
Always yours, my dear Alfred, 

W. M. Thackeray. 

Naturally this letter gave Tennyson more pleasure 
than all the converted critics with their favourable 



Q5 TENNYSON 

reviews. The Duke of Argyll announced the con- 
version of Macaulay. The Master found Elaine 
" the fairest, sweetest, purest love poem in the Eng- 
lish language." As to the whole, " The allegory in 
the distance greatly strengthens, also elevates, the mean- 
ing, of the poem." 

Ruskin, like some other critics, felt " the art and 
finish in these poems a little more than I like to feel 
it." Yet Guinevere and Elaine had been rapidly 
written and little corrected. I confess to the opinion 
that what a man does most easily is, as a rule, what 
he does best. We know that the " art and finish " 
of Shakespeare were spontaneous, and so were those 
of Tennyson. Perfection in art is sometimes more 
sudden than we think, but then " the long prepara- 
tion for it, — that unseen germination, that is what we 
ignore and forget." But he wisely kept his pieces by 
him for a long time, restudying them with a fresh 
eye. The " unreality " of the subject also failed to 
please Ruskin, as it is a stumbling-block to others. 
He wanted poems on " the living present," a theme 
not selected by Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, 
Virgil, or the Greek dramatists, except (among sur- 
viving plays) in the Persa: of i^schylus. The poet 
who can transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but 
most, and the greatest, have visited the cool quiet 
purlieus of the past. 



VII 

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 

The Idylls may probably be best considered in 
their final shape : they are not an epic, but a series of 
heroic idyllia of the same genre as the heroic idyllia of 
Theocritus. He wrote long after the natural age of 
national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later 
literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius 
Rhodius, a poem with many beauties, if rather an 
archaistic and elaborate revival as a whole. The time 
for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to have 
thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic 
idyllia of Heracles, and certain adventures of the 
Argonauts. Tennyson, too, from the first believed 
that his pieces ought to be short. Therefore, though 
he had a conception of his work as a whole, a con- 
ception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, 
he produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He 
had a spiritual conception, " an allegory in the dis- 
tance," an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its 
presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did 
Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise " the sceptical 
understanding " (as if one were to " break into blank 
the gospel of" Herr Kant), or poor Guinevere to 
stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table 
, L.ofC. 99 



100 TENNYSON 

Round for Liberal Institutions. Mercifully Tenny- 
son never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion. 
Later he thought of a musical masque of Arthur, and 
sketched a scenario. Finally Tennyson dropped both 
the allegory of Liberal principles and the musical 
masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There 
was only a "parabolic drift" in the intention. 
" There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, 
however seemingly mystical, which cannot be ex- 
plained without any mystery or allegory whatever." 
The Idylls ought to be read (and the right readers 
never dream of doing anything else) as romantic 
poems, just like Browning's Childe Roland, in which 
the wrong readers (the members of the Browning 
Society) sought for mystic mountains and marvels. 
Yet Tennyson had his own interpretation, " a dream 
of man coming into practical life and ruined by one 
sin." That was his " interpretation," or " allegory 
in the distance." 

People may be heard objecting to the suggestion of 
any spiritual interpretation of the Arthur legends, and 
even to the existence of elementary morality among 
the Arthurian knights and ladies. There seems to be 
a notion that "bold bawdry and open manslaughter," 
as Roger Ascham said, are the staple of Tennyson's 
sources, whether in the mediaeval French, the Welsh, 
or in Malory's compilation, chiefly from French 
sources. Tennyson is accused of u Bowdlerising " 
these, and of introducing gentleness, courtesy, and 
conscience into a literature where such qualities were 
unknown. I must confess myself ignorant of any 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 10 1 

early and popular, or " primitive " literature, in which 
human virtues, and the human conscience, do not 
play their part. Those who object to Tennyson's 
handling of the great Arthurian cycle, on the ground 
that he is too refined and too moral, must either 
never have read or must long have forgotten even 
Malory's romance. Thus we read, in a recent 
novel, that Lancelot was an homme aux bonnes 
fortunes, whereas Lancelot was the most loyal of 
lovers. 

Among other critics, Mr. Harrison has objected 
that the Arthurian world of Tennyson " is not quite 
an ideal world. Therein lies the difficulty. The 
scene, though not of course historic, has certain 
historic suggestions and characters." It is not appar- 
ent who the historic characters are, for the real 
Arthur is but a historic phantasm. " But then, in the 
midst of so much realism, the knights, from Arthur 
downwards, talk and act in ways with which we are 
familiar in modern ethical and psychological novels, 
but which are as impossible in real mediaeval knights 
as a Bengal tiger or a Polar bear would be in a draw- 
ing-room." I confess to little acquaintance with 
modern ethical novels; but real mediaeval knights, 
and still more the knights of mediaeval romance, were 
capable of very ethical actions. To halt an army for 
the protection and comfort of a laundress was a highly 
ethical action. Perhaps Sir Redvers Buller would do 
it : Bruce did. Mr. Harrison accuses the ladies of 
the Idylls of soul-bewildering casuistry, like that of 
women in Middlemarch or Helbeck of Bannisdale. 



102 TENNYSON 

Now I am not reminded by Guinevere, and Elaine, 
and Enid, of ladies in these ethical novels. But the 
women of the mediaeval Cours d' Amour (the originals 
from whom the old romancers drew) were nothing if 
not casuists. " Spiritual delicacy " (as they under- 
stood it) was their delight. 

Mr. Harrison even argues that Malory's men lived 
hot-blooded lives in fierce times, " before an idea had 
arisen in the world of c reverencing conscience,' ' lead- 
ing sweet lives,' " and so on. But he admits that 
they had "fantastic ideals of 'honour' and 'love.'" 
As to " fantastic," that is a matter of opinion, but to 
have ideals and to live in accordance with them is to 
" reverence conscience," which the heroes of the 
romances are said by Mr. Harrison never to have had 
an idea of doing. They are denied even " amiable 
words and courtliness." Need one say that courtli- 
ness is the dominant note of mediaeval knights, in his- 
tory as in romance ? With discourtesy Froissart 
would " head the count of crimes." After a battle, 
he says, Scots knights and English would thank each 
other for a good fight, " not like the Germans." 
"And now, I dare say," said Malory's Sir Ector, 
" thou, Sir Lancelot, wast the curtiest knight that 
ever bare shield, . . . and thou wast the meekest 
man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among 
ladies." Observe Sir Lancelot in the difficult pass 
where the Lily Maid offers her love : — " Jesu defend 
me, for then I rewarded your father and your brother 
full evil for their great goodness. . . . But be- 
cause, fair damsel, that ye love me as ye say ye do, I 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING IO3 

will, for your good will and kindness, show you some 
goodness, ... and always while I live to be 
your true knight." Here are "amiable words and 
courtesy." I cannot agree with Mr. Harrison that 
Malory's book is merely " a fierce lusty epic." That 
was not the opinion of its printer and publisher, Cax- 
ton. He produced it as an example of " the gentle 
and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these 
days, . . . noble and renowned acts of human- 
ity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be 
seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, 
love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do 
after the good and leave the evil." 

In reaction against the bold-faced heroines and 
sensual amours of some of the old French romances, 
an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, 
notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work 
which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is dis- 
traught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, 
he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI chap. 
viii). After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, 
with the reproachful Voice, Sir Lancelot said, " My 
sin and my wickedness have brought me great dis- 
honour, ... and now I see and understand that 
my old sin hindereth and shameth me." He was 
human, the Lancelot of Malory, and "fell to his old 
love again," with a heavy heart, and with long pen- 
ance at the end. How such good knights can be 
deemed conscienceless and void of courtesy one 
knows not, except by a survival of the Puritanism of 
Ascham. But Tennyson found in the book what is 



104 TENNYSON 

in the book — honour, conscience, courtesy, and the 
hero — 

" Whose honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." 

Malory's book, which was Tennyson's chief source, 
ends by being the tragedy of the conscience of Lance- 
lot. Arthur is dead, or " In Avalon he groweth 
old." The Oueen and Lancelot might sing, as 
Lennox reports that Queen Mary did after Darnley's 
murder — 

" Weel is me 
For I am free" 

" Why took they not their pastime ? " Because con- 
science forbade, and Guinevere sends her lover far 
from her, and both die in religion. Thus Malory's 
" fierce lusty epic " is neither so lusty nor so fierce 
but that it gives Tennyson his keynote : the sin that 
breaks the fair companionship, and is bitterly re- 
pented. 

"The knights are almost too polite to kill each 
other," the critic urges. In Malory they are some- 
times quite too polite to kill each other. Sir Darras 
has a blood-feud against Sir Tristram, and Sir Tris- 
tram is in his dungeon. Sir Darras said, " Wit ye 
well that Sir Darras shall never destroy such a noble 
knight as thou art in prison, howbeit that thou hast 
slain three of my sons, whereby I was greatly ag- 
grieved. But now shalt thou go and thy fellows. 
All that ye did," said Sir Darras, "was by 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING IO5 

force of knighthood, and that was the cause I would 
not put you to death" (Book IX chap. xl). 

Tennyson is accused of " emasculating the fierce 
lusty epic into a moral lesson, as if it were to be per- 
formed in a drawing-room by an academy of young 
ladies" — presided over, I dare say, by "Anglican 
clergymen." I know not how any one who has read 
the Morte d' Arthur can blame Tennyson in the mat- 
ter. Let Malory and his sources be blamed, if to be 
moral is to be culpable. A few passages apart, there 
is no coarseness in Malory ; that there are conscience, 
courtesy, " sweet lives," " keeping down the base in 
man," " amiable words," and all that Tennyson gives, 
and, in Mr. Harrison's theory, gives without authority 
in the romance, my quotations from Malory demon- 
strate. They are chosen at a casual opening of his 
book. That there " had not arisen in the world " 
" the idea of reverencing conscience " before the close 
of the fifteenth century a. d. is an extraordinary state- 
ment for a critic of history to ofFer. 

Mr. Harrison makes his protest because " in the 
conspiracy of silence into which Tennyson's just 
fame has hypnotised the critics, it is bare honesty to 
admit defects." I think I am not hypnotised, and I 
do not regard the Idylls as the crown of Tennyson's 
work. But it is not his " defect " to have introduced 
generosity, gentleness, conscience, and chastity where 
no such things occur in his sources. Take Sir 
Darras: his position is that of Priam when he meets 
Achilles, who slew his sons, except that Priam comes 
as a suppliant ; Sir Darras has Tristram in his hands, 



106 TENNYSON 

and may slay him. He is " too polite," as Mr. Har- 
rison says : he is too good a Christian, or too good a 
gentleman. One would not have given a tripod for 
the life of Achilles had he fallen into the hands of 
Priam. But between 1200 b. c. (or so) and the date 
of Malory, new ideas about " living sweet lives " had 
arisen. Where and when do they not arise ? A 
British patrol fired on certain Swazis in time of truce. 
Their lieutenant who had been absent when this oc- 
curred, rode alone to the stronghold of the Swazi 
king, Sekukoeni, and gave himself up, expecting 
death by torture. " Go, sir," said the king ; " we 
too are gentlemen." The idea of a " sweet life " of 
honour had dawned even on Sekukoeni : it lights up 
Malory's romance, and is reflected in Tennyson's 
Idylls, doubtless with some modernism of expression. 
That the Idylls represent no real world is certain. 
That Tennyson modernises and moralises too much, 
I willingly admit ; what I deny is that he introduces 
gentleness, courtesy, and conscience where his sources 
have none. Indeed this is not a matter of critical 
opinion, but of verifiable fact. Any one can read 
Malory and judge for himself. But the world in 
which the Idylls move could not be real. For more 
than a thousand years different races, different ages, 
had taken hold of the ancient Celtic legends and 
spiritualised them after their own manner, and 
moulded them to their own ideals. There may have 
been a historical Arthur, Comes Britannia, after the 
Roman withdrawal. Ye Amherawdyr Arthur, "the 
Emperor Arthur," may have lived and fought, and 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING IO7 

led the Brythons to battle. But there may also have 
been a Brythonic deity, or culture hero, of the same, 
or of a similar name, and myths about him may have 
been assigned to a real Arthur. Again, the Arthur of 
the old Welsh legends was by no means the blameless 
king, even in comparatively late French romances he 
is not blameless. But the process of idealising him 
went on : still incomplete in Malory's compilation, 
where he is often rather otiose and far from royal. 
Tennyson, for his purpose, completed the idealisa- 
tion. 

As to Guinevere, she was not idealised in the old 
Welsh rhyme — 

" Guinevere, Giant Ogurvan's daughter, 
Naughty young, more naughty later." 

Of Lancelot, and her passion for him, the old 
Welsh has nothing to say. Probably Chretien de 
Troyes, by a happy blunder or misconception, gave 
Lancelot his love and his preeminent part. Lance- 
lot was confused with Peredur, and Guinevere with 
the lady of whom Peredur was in quest. The Elaine 
who becomes by Lancelot the mother of Galahad, 
" was Lancelot's rightful consort, as one recognises 
in her name that of Elen, the Empress, whom the 
story of Peredur " (Lancelot, by the confusion) 
" gives that hero to wife." The second Elaine, the 
maid of Astolat, is another refraction from the origi- 
nal Elen. As to the Grail, it may be a Christianised 
rendering of one or another of the magical and 
mystic caldrons of Welsh or Irish legend. There is 



108 TENNYSON 

even an apparent Celtic source of the mysterious 
fisher king of the Grail romance. 1 

A sketch of the evolution of the Arthurian legends 
might run thus : — 

Sixth to eighth century, growth of myth about an 

Arthur, real, or supposed to be real. 
Tenth century, the Duchies of Normandy and 

Brittany are in close relations ; by the eleventh 

century Normans know Celtic Arthurian stories. 
After 1066, Normans in contact with the Celtic 

peoples of this island are in touch with the 

Arthur tales. 
1 1 30-1 145, works on Arthurian matter by Geoffrey 

of Monmouth. 
1 155, Wace's French translation of Geoffrey. 
1 1 50-1 182, Chretien de Troyes writes poems on 

Arthurian topics. 
French prose romances on Arthur, from, say, 1180 

to 1250. Those romances reach Wales, and 

modify, in translations, the original Welsh 

legends, or, in part, supplant them. 
Amplifications and recastings are numerous. In 

1485 Caxton publishes Malory's selections from 

French and English sources, the whole being 

Tennyson's main source, Le Mort d? Arthur? 

1 The English reader may consult Mr. Rhys's The Arthurian 
Legend, Oxford, 189 1, and Mr. Nutt's Studies of the Legend of the 
Holy Grail, which will direct him to other authorities and sources. 

2 1 have summarised, with omission, Miss Jessie L. Watson's 
sketch in King Arthur and his Knights. Nutt, 1899. The learn- 
ing of the subject is enormous; Dr. Sommer's Le Mort d' Arthur, 
the second volume may be consulted. Nutt, 1899. 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 100, 

Thus the Arthur stories, originally Celtic, originally 
a mass of semi-pagan legend, myth, and marchen, 
have been retold and rehandled by Norman, English- 
man, and Frenchman, taking on new hues, expressing 
new ideals — religious, chivalrous, and moral. Any 
poet may work his will on them, and Tennyson's will 
was to retain the chivalrous courtesy, generosity, love, 
and asceticism, while dimly or brightly veiling or 
illuminating them with his own ideals. After so 
many processes, from folk-tale to modern idyll, the 
Arthurian world could not be real, and real it is not. 
Camelot lies " out of space, out of time," though 
the colouring is mainly that of the later chivalry, and 
" the gleam " on the hues is partly derived from 
Celtic fancy of various dates, and is partly Tenny- 
sonian. 

As the Idylls were finally arranged, the first, The 
Coming of Arthur, is a remarkable proof of Tenny- 
son's ingenuity in construction. Tales about the 
birth of Arthur varied. In Malory, Uther Pendragon, 
the Bretwalda (in later phrase) of Britain, besieges the 
Duke of Tintagil, who has a fair wife, Ygerne, in 
another castle. Merlin magically puts on Uther the 
shape of Ygerne's husband, and as her husband she 
receives him. On that night Arthur is begotten by 
Uther, and the Duke of Tintagil, his mother's hus- 
band, is slain in a sortie. Uther weds Ygerne ; both 
recognise Arthur as their child. However, by the 
Celtic custom of fosterage the infant is intrusted to 
Sir Ector as his dalt, or foster-child, and Uther falls 
in battle. Arthur is later approven king by the ad- 



HO TENNYSON 

venture of drawing from the stone the magic sword 
that no other king could move. This adventure an- 
swers to Sigmund's drawing the sword from the Bran- 
stock, in the Volsunga Saga, " Now men stand up, and 
none would fain be the last to lay hand to the sword," 
apparently stricken into the pillar by Woden. " But 
none who came thereto might avail to pull it out, for 
in nowise would it come away howsoever they tugged 
at it, but now up comes Sigmund, King Volsung's 
son, and sets hand to the sword, and pulls it from the 
stock, even as if it lay loose before him." The in- 
cident in the Arthurian as in the Volsunga legend is 
on a par with the Golden Bough, in the sixth book 
of the JEneid. Only the predestined champion, such 
as i^neas, can pluck, or break, or cut the bough — 

" Ipse volens facilisque sequetur 
Si te fata vocant." 

All this ancient popular element in the Arthur 
story is disregarded by Tennyson. He does not make 
Uther approach Ygerne in the semblance of her lord, 
as Zeus approached Alcmena in the semblance of her 
husband, Amphitryon. He neglects the other ancient 
test of the proving of Arthur by his success in draw- 
ing the sword. The poet's object is to enfold the 
origin and birth of Arthur in a spiritual mystery. This 
is deftly accomplished by aid of the various versions 
of the tale that reach King Leodogran when Arthur 
seeks the hand of his daughter Guinevere, for Arthur's 
title to the crown is still disputed, so Leodogran 
makes inquiries. The answers first leave it dubious 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING III 

whether Arthur is son of Gorlois, husband of Ygerne, 
or of Uther, who slew Gorlois and married her : — . 

" Enforced she was to wed him in her tears." 

The Celtic custom of fosterage is overlooked, and 
Merlin gives the child to Anton, not as the custom- 
ary dalt, but to preserve the babe from danger. 
Queen Bellicent then tells Leodogran, from the evi- 
dence of Bleys, Merlin's master in necromancy, the 
story of Arthur's miraculous advent. 

" And down the wave and in the flame was borne 
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet, 
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried ■ The King ! 
Here is an heir for Uther ! ' " 

But Merlin, when asked by Bellicent to corroborate 
the statement of Bleys, merely 

" Answer'd in riddling triplets of old time." 

Finally, Leodogran's faith is confirmed by a vision. 
Thus doubtfully, amidst rumour and portent, cloud 
and spiritual light, comes Arthur : " from the great 
deep " he comes, and in as strange fashion, at the 
end, " to the great deep he goes " ; a king to be ac- 
cepted in faith or rejected by doubt. Arthur and his 
ideal are objects of belief. All goes well while the 
knights hold that 



'&* 



" The King will follow Christ, and we the King, 
In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing." 



112 TENNYSON 

In history we find the same situation in the France 
of 1429 — 

" The King will follow Jeanne, and we the King." 

While this faith held, all went well ; when the king 
ceased to follow, the spell was broken : the Maid was 
martyred. In this sense the poet conceives the com- 
ing of Arthur, a sign to be spoken against, a test of 
high purposes, a belief redeeming and ennobling till 
faith fails, and the little rift within the lute, the love 
of Lancelot and Guinevere, makes discord of the 
music. As matter of legend, it is to be understood 
that Guinevere did not recognise Arthur when first 
he rode below her window — 

" Since he neither wore on helm or shield 
The golden symbol of his kinglihood." 

But Lancelot was sent to bring the bride — 

" And return'd 
Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere." 

Then their long love may have begun, as in the story 
of Tristram sent to bring Yseult to the bride of 
King Mark. In Malory, however, Lancelot does not 
come on the scene till after Arthur's wedding and 
return from his conquering expedition to Rome. 
Then Lancelot wins renown, " wherefore Oueen 
Guinevere had him in favour above all other knights ; 
and in certain he loved the Oueen ao-ain above all 

-SO D 

other ladies or damosels of his life." Lancelot, as we 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING II3 

have seen, is practically a French creation, adopted to 
illustrate the chivalrous theory of love, with its bitter 
fruit. Though not of the original Celtic stock of 
legend, Sir Lancelot makes the romance what it is, 
and draws down the tragedy that originally turned on 
the sin of Arthur himself, the sin that gave birth to 
the traitor Modred. But the mediaeval romancers 
disguised that form of the story, and the process of 
idealising Arthur reached such heights in the middle 
ages that Tennyson thought himself at liberty to 
paint the Flos Regum, " the blameless King." He 
followed the Brut ab Arthur. " In short, God has 
not made since Adam was, the man more perfect than 
Arthur." This is remote from the Arthur of the 
oldest Celtic legends, but justifies the poet in adapt- 
ing Arthur to the ideal hero of the Idylls : — 

" Ideal manhood closed in real man, 

Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still ; or him 
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one 
Touched by the adulterous finger of a time 
That hover'd between war and wantonness, 
And crownings and dethronements." 

The poetical beauties of The Coming of Arthur ex- 
cel those of Gareth and Lynette. The sons of Lot 
and Bellicent seem to have been originally regarded as 
the incestuous offspring of Arthur and his sister, the 
wife of King Lot. Next it was represented that 
Arthur was ignorant of the relationship. Mr. Rhys 



114 TENNYSON 

supposes that the mythical scandal (still present in 
Malory as a sin of ignorance) arose from blending the 
Celtic Arthur (as Culture Hero) with an older divine 
personage, such as Zeus, who marries his sister Hera. 
Marriages of brother and sister are familiar in the 
Egyptian royal house, and that of the Incas. But the 
poet has a perfect right to disregard a scandalous 
myth which, obviously crystallised later about the 
figure of the mythical Celtic Arthur, was an incon- 
gruous accretion to his legend. Gareth, therefore, is 
merely Arthur's nephew, not son, in the poem, as are 
Gawain and the traitor Modred. The story seems to 
be rather mediaeval French than Celtic ; a mingling 
of the spirit of fabliau and popular fairy tale. The 
poet has added to its lightness, almost frivolity, the 
description of the unreal city of Camelot, built to 
music, as when 

"Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers." 

He has also brought in the allegory of Death, which, 
when faced, proves to be " a blooming boy " behind 
the mask. The courtesy and prowess of Lancelot 
lead up to the later development of his character. 

In The Marriage of Geraint, a rumour has already 
risen about Lancelot and the Queen, darkening the 
Court, and presaging 

" The world's loud whisper breaking into storm." 

For this reason, Geraint removes Enid from Camelot 
to his own land : the poet thus early leading up to the 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING II5 

sin and the doom of Lancelot. But this motive does 
not occur in the Welsh story of Enid and Geraint, 
which Tennyson has otherwise followed with un- 
wonted closeness. The tale occurs in French ro- 
mances in various forms, but it appears to have re- 
turned, by way of France and coloured with French 
influences, to Wales, where it is one of the later 
Mabinogion. The characters are Celtic, and Nud, 
father of Edyrn, Geraint's defeated antagonist, ap- 
pears to be recognised by Mr. Rhys as " the Celtic 
Zeus." The manners and the tournaments are 
French. In the Welsh tale Geraint and Enid are 
bedded in Arthur's own chamber, which seems to be 
a symbolic commutation of the jus primes north, a 
custom of which the very existence is disputed. This 
unseemly antiquarian detail, of course, is omitted in 
the Idyll. 

An abstract of the Welsh tale will show how closely 
Tennyson here follows his original. News is brought 
into Arthur's Court of the appearance of a white stag. 
The king arranges a hunt, and Guinevere asks leave 
to go and watch the sport. Next morning she cannot 
be wakened, though the tale does not aver, like the 
Idyll, that she was 

" Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love 
For Lancelot." 

Guinevere wakes late, and rides through a ford of Usk 
to the hunt. Geraint follows, " a golden-hilted sword 
was at his side, and a robe and a surcoat of satin were 
upon him, and two shoes of leather upon his feet, and 



Il6 TENNYSON 

around him was a scarf of blue purple, at each corner 
of which was a golden apple " : — 

" But Guinevere lay late into the morn, 

Lost in sweet dreams, and dreaming of her love 

For Lancelot, and forgetful of the hunt ; 

But rose at last, a single maiden with her, 

Took horse, and forded Usk, and gain'd the wood ; 

There, on a little knoll beside it, stay'd 

Waiting to hear the hounds ; but heard instead 

A sudden sound of hoofs, for Prince Geraint, 

Late also, wearing neither hunting-dress 

Nor weapon, save a golden-hiked brand, 

Came quickly flashing thro' the shallow ford 

Behind them, and so gallop'd up the knoll. 

A purple scarf, at either end whereof 

There swung an apple of the purest gold, 

Sway'd round about him, as he gallop'd up 

To join them, glancing like a dragon-fly 

In summer suit and silks of holiday." 

The encounter with the dwarf, the lady, and the knight 
follows. The prose of the Mabinogi may be com- 
pared with the verse of Tennyson : — 

" Geraint," said Gwenhwyvar, " knowest thou the name 
of that tall knight yonder ? " " I know him not," said he, 
" and the strange armour that he wears prevents my either 
seeing his face or his features." " Go, maiden," said Gwen- 
hwyvar, " and ask the dwarf who that knight is." Then 
the maiden went up to the dwarf; and the dwarf waited for 
the maiden, when he saw her coming towards him. And 
the maiden inquired of the dwarf who the knight was. " I 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING II7 

will not tell thee," he answered. " Since thou art so chur- 
lish as not to tell me," said she, " I will ask him myself." 
" Thou shalt not ask him, by my faith," said he. " Where- 
fore ? " said she. " Because thou art not of honour sufficient 
to befit thee to speak to my Lord." Then the maiden turned 
her horse's head towards the knight, upon which the dwarf 
struck her with the whip that was in his hand across the face 
and the eyes, until the blood flowed forth. And the maiden, 
through the hurt she received from the blow, returned to 
Gwenhwyvar, complaining of the pain. " Very rudely has 
the dwarf treated thee," said Geraint. "I will go myself to 
know who the knight is." " Go," said Gwenhwyvar. 
And Geraint went up to the dwarf. " Who is yonder 
knight ? " said Geraint. '* I will not tell thee," said the 
dwarf. " Then will I ask him myself," said he. " That 
wilt thou not, by my faith," said the dwarf, " thou art not 
honourable enough to speak with my Lord." Said Geraint, 
" I have spoken with men of equal rank with him." And 
he turned his horse's head towards the knight ; but the dwarf 
overtook him, and struck him as he had done the maiden, so 
that the blood coloured the scarf that Geraint wore. Then 
Geraint put his hand upon the hilt of his sword, but he took 
counsel with himself, and considered that it would be no 
vengeance for him to slay the dwarf, and to be attacked un- 
armed by the armed knight, so he returned to where Gwen- 
hwyvar was. 

" And while they listen'd for the distant hunt, 
And chiefly for the baying of Cavall, 
King Arthur's hound of deepest mouth, there rode 
Full slowly by a knight, lady, and dwarf; 
Whereof the dwarf lagg'd latest, and the knight 
Had vizor up, and show'd a youthful face, 



Il8 TENNYSON 

Imperious, and of haughtiest lineaments. 

And Guinevere, not mindful of his face 

In the King's hall, desired his name, and sent 

Her maiden to demand it of the dwarf; 

Who being vicious, old and irritable, 

And doubling all his master's vice of pride, 

Made answer sharply that she should not know. 

« Then will I ask it of himself,' she said. 

'Nay, by my faith, thou shalt not,' cried the dwarf; 

* Thou art not worthy ev'n to speak of him ' ; 

And when she put her horse towards the knight, 

Struck at her with his whip, and she return'd 

Indignant to the Oueen ; whereat Geraint 

Exclaiming, * Surely I will learn the name/ 

Made sharply to the dwarf, and ask'd it of him, 

Who answer'd as before ; and when the Prince 

Had put his horse in motion towards the knight, 

Struck at him with his whip, and cut his cheek. 

The Prince's blood spirted upon the scarf, 

Dyeing it ; and his quick, instinctive hand 

Caught at the hilt, as to abolish him : 

But he, from his exceeding manfulness 

And pure nobility of temperament, 

Wroth to be wroth at such a worm, refrain'd 

From ev'n a word." 

The self-restraint of Geraint, who does not slay the 
dwarf, 

" from his exceeding manfulness 
And pure nobility of temperament," 

may appear " too polite," and too much in accord 
with the still undiscovered idea of " leading sweet 
lives." However, the uninvented idea does occur in 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 119 

the Welsh original : " Then Geraint put his hand 
upon the hilt of his sword, but he took counsel with 
himself, and considered that it would be no vengeance 
for him to slay the dwarf," while he also reflects that 
he would be " attacked unarmed by the armed knight." 
Perhaps Tennyson may be blamed for omitting this 
obvious motive for self-restraint. Geraint therefore 
follows the knight in hope of finding arms, and ar- 
rives at the town all busy with preparations for the 
tournament of the sparrow-hawk. This was a chal- 
lenge sparrow-hawk ; the knight had won it twice, 
and if he won it thrice it would be his to keep. The 
rest, in the tale, is exactly followed in the Idyll. 
Geraint is entertained by the ruined Yniol. The 
youth bears the " costrel " full of "good purchased 
mead " (the ruined Earl not brewing for himself) and 
Enid carries the manchet bread in her veil, " old, and 
beginning to be worn out." All Tennyson's own is 
the beautiful passage — 

" And while he waited in the castle court, 
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang 
Clear thro' the open casement of the hall, 
Singing ; and as the sweet voice of a bird, 
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle, 
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is 
That sings so delicately clear, and make 
Conjecture of the plumage and the form ; 
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint ; 
And made him like a man abroad at morn 
When first the liquid note beloved of men 
Comes flying over many a windy wave 



120 TENNYSON 

To Britain, and in April suddenly 

Breaks from a coppice gemm'd with green and red, 

And he suspends his converse with a friend, 

Or it may be the labour of his hands, 

To think or say, * There is the nightingale ' ; 

So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said, 

' Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me.' " 

Yniol frankly admits in the tale that he was in the 
wrong in the quarrel with his nephew. The poet, 
however, gives him the right, as is natural. The 
combat is exactly followed in the Idyll, as is Geraint's 
insistence in carrying his bride to Court in her faded 
silks. Geraint, however, leaves Court with Enid, 
not because of the scandal about Lancelot, but to do 
his duty in his own country. He becomes indolent 
and uxorious, and Enid deplores his weakness, and 
awakes his suspicions, thus : — 

And one morning in the summer time, they were upon 
their couch, and Geraint lay upon the edge of it. And 
Enid was without sleep in the apartment which had win- 
dows of glass. And the sun shone upon the couch. And 
the clothes had slipped from off his arms and his breast, and 
he was asleep. Then she gazed upon the marvelous beauty 
of his appearance, and she said, " Alas, and am I the cause 
that these arms and this breast have lost their glory and the 
warlike fame which they once so richly enjoyed ! " And as 
she said this, the tears dropped from her eyes, and they fell 
upon his breast. And the tears she shed, and the words she 
had spoken, awoke him ; and another thing contributed to 
awaken him, and that was the idea that it was not in think- 
ing of him that she spoke thus, but that it was because she 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 121 

loved some other man more than him, and that she wished 
for other society, and thereupon Geraint was troubled in his 
mind, and he called his squire ; and when he came to him, 
" Go quickly," said he, " and prepare my horse and my 
arms, and make him ready. And do thou arise," said he 
to Enid, "and apparel thyself; and cause thy horse to be 
accoutred, and clothe thee in the worst riding-dress that 
thou hast in thy possession. And evil betide me," said he, 
" if thou returnest here until thou knowest whether I have 
lost my strength so completely as thou didst say. And if it 
be so, it will then be easy for thee to seek the society thou 
didst wish for of him of whom thou wast thinking." So she 
arose, and clothed herself in her meanest garment. "I 
know nothing, Lord," said she, " of thy meaning." 
" Neither wilt thou know at this time," said he. 

" At last, it chanced that on a summer morn 
(They sleeping each by either) the new sun 
Beat thro' the blindless casement of the room, 
And heated the strong warrior in his dreams ; 
Who, moving, cast the coverlet aside, 
And bared the knotted column of his throat, 
The massive square of his heroic breast, 
And arms on which the standing muscles sloped, 
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
Running too vehemently to break upon it. 
And Enid woke and sat beside the couch, 
Admiring him, and thought within herself, 
Was ever man so grandly made as he ? 
Then, like a shadow, past the people's talk 
And accusation of uxoriousness 
Across her mind, and bowing over him, 
Low to her own heart piteously she said : 



122 TENNYSON 

* O noble breast and all-puissant arms, 
Am I the cause, I the poor cause that men 
Reproach you, saying all your force is gone ? 
I am the cause, because I dare not speak 
And tell him what I think and what they say. 
And yet I hate that he should linger here ; 
I cannot love my lord and not his name. 
Far liefer had I gird his harness on him, 
And ride with him to battle and stand by, 
And watch his mightful hand striking great blows 
At caitiffs and at wrongers of the world. 
Far better were I laid in the dark earth, 
Not hearing any more his noble voice, 
Not to be folded more in these dear arms, 
And darken'd from the high light in his eyes, 
Than that my lord thro' me should suffer shame. 
Am I so bold, and could I so stand by, 
And see my dear lord wounded in the strife, 
Or maybe pierced to death before mine eyes, 
And yet not dare to tell him what I think, 
And how men slur him, saying all his force 
Is melted into mere effeminacy ? 
O me, I fear that I am no true wife.' 

Half inwardly, half audibly she spoke, 
And the strong passion in her made her weep 
True tears upon his broad and naked breast, 
And these awoke him, and by great mischance 
He heard but fragments of her later words, 
And that she fear'd she was not a true wife. 
And then he thought, ' In spite of all my care, 
For all my pains, poor man, for all my pains, 
She is not faithful to me, and I see her 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 23 

Weeping for some gay knight in Arthur's hall.* 
Then tho' he loved and reverenced her too much 
To dream she could be guilty of foul act, 
Right thro' his manful breast darted the pang 
That makes a man, in the sweet face of her 
Whom he loves most, lonely and miserable. 
At this he hurl'd his huge limbs out of bed, 
And shook his drowsy squire awake and cried, 
* My charger and her palfrey ' ; then to her, 
' I will ride forth into the wilderness ; 
For tho' it seems my spurs are yet to win, 
I have not fall'n so low as some would wish. 
And thou, put on thy worst and meanest dress 
And ride with me.' And Enid ask'd, amazed, 
'If Enid errs, let Enid learn her fault.' 
But he, * I charge thee, ask not, but obey/ 
Then she bethought her of a faded silk, 
A faded mantle and a faded veil, 
And moving towards a cedarn cabinet, 
Wherein she kept them folded reverently 
With sprigs of summer laid between the folds, 
She took them, and array'd herself therein, 
Remembering when first he 'came on her 
Drest in that dress, and how he loved her in it, 
And all her foolish fears about the dress, 
And all his journey to her, as himself 
Had told her, and their coming to the court." 

Tennyson's 

" Arms on which the standing muscle sloped, 
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
Running too vehemently to break upon it," 

is suggested perhaps by Theocritus — " The muscles 



124 TENNYSON 

on his brawny arms stood out like rounded rocks that 
the winter torrent has rolled and worn smooth, in the 
great swirling stream " (Idyll xxii). 

The second part of the poem follows the original 
less closely. Thus Limours, in the tale, is not an 
old suitor of Enid ; Edyrn does not appear to the 
rescue ; certain cruel games, veiled in a magic mist, 
occur in the tale, and are omitted by the poet; 
" Gwyffert petit, so called by the Franks, whom the 
Cymry call the Little King," in the tale, is not a 
character in the Idyll, and, generally, the gross Celtic 
exaggerations of Geraint's feats are toned down by 
Tennyson. In other respects, as when Geraint eats 
the mowers' dinner, the tale supplies the materials. 
But it does not dwell tenderly on the reconciliation. 
The tale is more or less in the vein of " patient 
Grizel," and he who told it is more concerned with 
the fighting than with amoris redintegration and the 
sufferings of Enid. The Idyll is enriched with many 
beautiful pictures from nature, such as this : — 

" But at the flash and motion of the man 
They vanish'd panic-stricken, like a shoal 
Of darting fish, that on a summer morn 
Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot 
Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand, 
But if a man who stands upon the brink 
But lift a shining hand against the sun, 
There is not left the twinkle of a fin 
Betwixt the cressy islets white in flower ; 
So, scared but at the motion of the man, 
Fled all the boon companions of the Earl, 
And left him lying in the public way." 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 25 

In Balln and Balan Tennyson displays great con- 
structive power, and remarkable skill in moulding the 
most recalcitrant materials. Balin or Balyn, according 
to Mr. Rhys, is the Belinus of Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth, "whose name represents the Celtic divinity 
described in Latin as Apollo Belenus or Belinus." l 
In Geoffrey, Belinus, euphemerised, or reduced from 
god to hero, has a brother, Brennius, the Celtic Bran, 
King of Britain from Caithness to the Humber. 
Belinus drives Bran into exile. " Thus it is seen that 
Belinus or Balyn was, mythologically speaking, the 
natural enemy " (as Apollo Belinus, the radiant god) 
" of the dark divinity Bran or Balan. " 

If this view be correct, the two brothers answer to the 
good and bad principles of myths like that of the Huron 
Iouskeha the Sun, and Anatensic the Moon, or rather 
Taouiscara and Iouskeha, the hostile brothers, Black 
and White. 2 These mythical brethren are, in Malory, 
two knights of Northumberland, Balin the wild and 
Balan. Their adventures are mixed up with a hostile 
Lady of the Lake, whom Balin slays in Arthur's pres- 
ence, with a sword which none but Balin can draw 
from sheath; and with an evil black-faced knight 
Garlon, invisible at will, whom Balin slays in 
the castle of the knight's brother, King Pellam. 
Pursued from room to room by Pellam, Balin finds 

BgAevos and B^X^m)?. He is referred to in inscriptions, e.g., 
Berlin, Corpus, iii, 4774, v. 732, 733, 1829, 2143-46; xii. 401. 
See also Ausonius (Leipsic, 1SS6, pp. 52, 59), cited by Rhys, The 
Arthurian Legend, p. 1 19, note 4. 

2 Brebeuf, Relations ties Jesuites, 1636, pp. 100-102. 



126 TENNYSON 

himself in a chamber full of relics of Joseph of 
Arimathea. There he seizes a spear, the very spear 
with which the Roman soldier pierced the side of the 
Crucified, and wounds Pellam. The castle falls in 
ruins " through that dolorous stroke. " Pellam be- 
comes the maimed king, who can only be healed by 
the Holy Grail. Apparently Celtic myths of obscure 
antiquity have been adapted in France, and interwoven 
with fables about Joseph of Arimathea and Christian 
mysteries. It is not possible here to go into the 
complicated learning of the subject. In Malory, 
Balin, after dealing the dolorous stroke, borrows a 
strange shield from a knight, and thus accoutred, 
meets his brother Balan, who does not recognise him. 
They fight, both die and are buried in one tomb, and 
Galahad later achieves the adventure of winning 
Balin's sword. " Thus endeth the tale of Balyn and 
of Balan, two brethren born in Northumberland, good 
knights," says Malory, simply, and unconscious of 
the strange mythological medley under the coat 
armour of romance. 

The materials, then, seemed confused and obdurate, 
but Tennyson works them into the course of the fatal 
love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and into the spiritual 
texture of the Idylls. Balin has been expelled from 
Court for the wildness that gives him his name, Balin 
le Sauvage. He had buffeted a squire in hall. He 
and Balan await all challengers beside a well. Arthur 
encounters and dismounts them. Balin devotes him- 
self to self-conquest. Then comes tidings that Pel- 
lam, of old leagued with Lot against Arthur, has taken 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 27 

to religion, collects relics, claims descent from Joseph 
of Arimathea, and owns the sacred spear that pierced 
the side of Christ. But Garlon is with him, the 
knight invisible, who appears to come from an Irish 
source, or at least has a parallel in Irish legend. This 
Garlon has an unknightly way of killing men by view- 
less blows from the rear. Balan goes to encounter 
Garlon. Balin remains, learning courtesy, modeling 
himself on Lancelot, and gaining leave to bear 
Guinevere's Crown Matrimonial for his cognisance, 
— which, of course, Balan does not know, — 

" As golden earnest of a better life." 

But Balin sees reason to think that Lancelot and 
Guinevere love even too well. 

" Then chanced, one morning, that Sir Balin sat 
Close-bower'd in that garden nigh the hall. 
A walk of roses ran from door to door ; 
A walk of lilies crost it to the bower : 
And down that range of roses the great Queen 
Came with slow steps, the morning on her face ; 
And all in shadow from the counter door 
Sir Lancelot as to meet her, then at once, 
As if he saw not, glanced aside, and paced 
The long white walk of lilies towards the bower. 
Follow'd the Queen ; Sir Balin heard her * Prince, 
Art thou so little loyal to thy Queen, 
As pass without good morrow to thy Queen ? ' 
To whom Sir Lancelot with his eyes on earth, 
' Fain would I still be loyal to the Queen.' 
' Yea so ' she said ' but so to pass me by — 



128 TENNYSON 

So loyal scarce is loyal to thyself, 
Whom all men rate the king of courtesy. 
Let be : ye stand, fair lord, as in a dream.' 

Then Lancelot with his hand among the flowers 
* Yea — for a dream. Last night methought I saw 
That maiden Saint who stands with lily in hand 
In yonder shrine. All round her prest the dark, 
And all the light upon her silver face 
Flow'd from the spiritual lily that she held. 
Lo ! these her emblems drew mine eyes — away : 
For see, how perfect-pure ! As light a flush 
As hardly tints the blossom of the quince 
Would mar their charm of stainless maidenhood.' 

* Sweeter to me ' she said * this garden rose 
Deep-hued and many-folded ! sweeter still 
The wild-wood hyacinth and the bloom of May. 
Prince, we have ridd'n before among the flowers 
In those fair days — not all as cool as these, 
Tho' season-earlier. Art thou sad ? or sick ? 
Our noble King will send thee his own leech — 
Sick ? or for any matter anger'd at me ? ' 

Then Lancelot lifted his large eyes ; they dwelt 
Deep-tranced on hers, and could not fall : her hue 
Changed at his gaze : so turning side by side 
They past, and Balin started from his bower. 

' Queen ? subject ? but I see not what I see. 
Damsel and lover ? hear not what I hear. 
My father hath begotten me in his wrath. 
I suffer from the things before me, know, 
Learn nothing ; am not worthy to be knight ; 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 29 

A churl, a clown ! ' and in him gloom on gloom 
Deepen'd : he sharply caught his lance and shield, 
Nor stay'd to crave permission of the King, 
But, mad for strange adventure, dash'd away." 

Balin is " disillusioned," his faith in the Ideal is 
shaken if not shattered. He rides at adventure. Ar- 
riving at the half-ruined castle of Pellam, that dubious 
devotee, he hears Garlon insult Guinevere, but re- 
strains himself. Next day, again insulted for bearing 
" the crown scandalous " on his shield, he strikes 
Garlon down, is pursued, seizes the sacred spear, and 
escapes. Vivien meets him in the woods, drops 
scandal in his ears, and so maddens him that he de- 
faces his shield with the crown of Guinevere. Her 
song, and her words, 

" This fire of Heaven, 
This old sun-worship, boy, will rise again, 
And beat the cross to earth, and break the King 
And all his Table," 

might be forced into an allegory of the revived pride 
of life, at the Renaissance and after. The maddened 
yells of Balin strike the ear of Balan, who thinks he 
has met the foul knight Garlon, that 

" Tramples on the goodly shield to show 
His loathing of our Order and the Queen." 

They fight, fatally wound, and finally recognise each 
other : Balan trying to restore Balin's faith in Guine- 
vere, who is merely slandered by Garlon and Vivien. 
Balin acknowledges that his wildness has been their 



I3O TENNYSON 

common bane, and they die, " either locked in either's 
arms." 

There is nothing in Malory, nor in any other 
source, so far as I am aware, which suggested to 
Tennyson the clou of the situation : the use of Guine- 
vere's crown as a cognisance by Balin. This device 
enables the poet to weave the rather confused and un- 
intelligible adventures of Balin and Balan into the 
scheme, and to make it a stage in the progress of his 
fable. That Balin was reckless and wild Malory 
bears witness, but his endeavours to conquer himself 
and reach the ideal set by Lancelot are Tennyson's 
addition, with all the tragedy of Balin's disenchant- 
ment and despair. The strange fantastic house of 
Pellam, full of the most sacred things, 

" In which he scarce could spy the Christ for Saints," 

yet sheltering the human fiend Garlon, is supplied by 
Malory, whose predecessors probably blended more 
than one myth of the old Cymry into the romance, 
washed over with Christian colouring. As Malory 
tells this part of the tale it is perhaps more strange 
and effective than in the Idyll. The introduction of 
Vivien into this adventure is wholly due to Tenny- 
son : her appearance here leads up to her triumph in 
the poem which follows, Merlin and Vivien. 

The nature and origin of Merlin are something of 
a mystery. Hints and rumours of Merlin, as of 
Arthur, stream from hill and grave as far north as 
Tweedside. If he was a historical person, myths of 
magic might crystallise round him, as round Virgil in 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 131 

Italy. The process would be the easier in a country 
where the practices of Druidry still lingered, and 
revived after the retreat of the Romans. The 
mediaeval romancers invented a legend that Merlin 
was a virgin-born child of Satan. In Tennyson he 
may be guessed to represent the fabled esoteric lore 
of old religions, with their vague pantheisms, and 
such magic as the tapas of Brahmanic legends. He 
is wise with a riddling evasive wisdom : the builder 
of Camelot, the prophet, a shadow of Druidry 
clinging to the Christian king. His wisdom cannot 
avail him : if he beholds " his own mischance with a 
glassy countenance," he cannot avoid his shapen fate. 
He becomes assotted of Vivien, and goes open-eyed 
to his doom. 

The enchantress, Vivien, is one of that dubious 
company of Ladies of the Lake, now friendly, now 
treacherous. Probably these ladies are the fairies of 
popular Celtic tradition, taken up into the more elab- 
orate poetry of Cymric literature and mediaeval 
romance. Mr. Rhys traces Vivien, or Nimue, or 
Nyneue, back, through a series of palaeographic 
changes and errors, to Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, a 
kind of lady of the lake he thinks, but the identifica- 
tion is not very satisfactory. Vivien is certainly "one 
of the damsels of the lake " in Malory, and the 
damsels of the lake seem to be lake fairies, with all 
their beguilements and strange unstable loves. " And 
always Merlin lay about the lady to have her 
maidenhood, and she was ever passing weary of him, 
and fain would have been delivered of him, for she 



I32 TENNYSON 

was afraid of him because he was a devil's son. . . . 
So by her subtle working she made Merlin to go 
under that stone to let her wit of the marvels there, 
but she wrought so there for him that he came never 
out for all the craft he could do. And so she departed 
and left Merlin." The sympathy of Malory is not 
with the enchanter. In the Idylls, as finally pub- 
lished, Vivien is born on a battle-field of death, with a 
nature perverted, and an instinctive hatred of the 
good. Wherefore she leaves the Court of King 
Mark to make mischief in Camelot. She is, in fact, 
the ideal minx, a character not elsewhere treated by 
Tennyson : — 

" She hated all the knights, and heard in thought 
Their lavish comment when her name was named. 
For once, when Arthur walking all alone, 
Vtxt at a rumour issued from herself 
Of some corruption crept among his knights, 
Had met her, Vivien, being greeted fair, 
Would fain have wrought upon his cloudy mood 
With reverent eyes mock-loyal, shaken voice, 
And flutter'd adoration, and at last 
With dark sweet hints of some who prized him more 
Than who should prize him most ; at which the King 
Had gazed upon her blankly and gone by : 
But one had watch'd and had not held his peace : 
It made the laughter of an afternoon 
That Vivien should attempt the blameless King. 
And after that, she set herself to gain 
Him, the most famous man of all those times, 
Merlin, who knew the range of all their arts, 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 33 

Had built the King his havens, ships, and halls, 
Was also Bard, and knew the starry heavens ; 
The people call'd him Wizard ; whom at first 
She play'd about with slight and sprightly talk, 
And vivid smiles, and faintly- venom 'd points 
Of slander, glancing here and grazing there ; 
And yielding to his kindlier moods, the Seer 
Would watch her at her petulance, and play, 
Ev'n when they seem'd unlovable, and laugh 
As those that watch a kitten ; thus he grew 
Tolerant of what he half disdain'd, and she, 
Perceiving that she was but half disdain'd, 
Began to break her sports with graver fits, 
Turn red or pale, would often when they met 
Sigh fully, or all-silent gaze upon him 
With such a fixt devotion, that the old man, 
Tho' doubtful, felt the flattery, and at times 
Would flatter his own wish in age for love 
And half believe her true : for thus at times 
He waver'd ; but that other clung to him, 
Fixt in her will, and so the seasons went." 

Vivien is modern enough, — if any type of char- 
acter is modern, — at all events there is no such 
Blanche Amory of a girl in the old legends and ro- 
mances. In these Merlin fatigues the lady by his 
love ; she learns his arts, and gets rid of him as she 
can. His forebodings in the Idyll contain a magnifi- 
cent image : — 

" There lay she all her length and kiss'd his feet, 
As if in deepest reverence and in love. 
A twist of gold was round her hair ; a robe 



134 TENNYSON 

Of samite without price, that more exprest 
Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs, 
In colour like the satin shining palm 
On sallows in the windy gleams of March : 
And while she kiss'd them, crying, 'Trample me, 
Dear feet, that I have follow'd thro' the world, 
And I will pay you worship ; tread me down 
And I will kiss you for it ' ; he was mute : 
So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain, 
As on a dull day in an Ocean cave 
The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
In silence." 

We think of the blinded Cyclops groping round his 
cave, like " the blind wave feeling round his long sea- 
hall." 

The richness, the many shining contrasts and im- 
mortal lines in Vivien seem almost too noble for a 
subject not easily redeemed, and the picture of the 
ideal Court lying in full corruption. Next to Elaine, 
Jowett wrote that he " admired Vivien the most (the 
naughty one), which seems to me a work of wonder- 
ful power and skill. It is most elegant and fanciful. 
I am not surprised at your Delilah beguiling the wise 
man, she is quite equal to it." The dramatic versa- 
tility of Tennyson's genius, his power of creating the 
most various characters, is nowhere better displayed 
than in the contrast between the Vivien and the 
Elaine. Vivien is a type, her adventure is of a na- 
ture, which he has not elsewhere handled. Thack- 
eray, who admired the Idylls so enthusiastically, might 
have recognised in Vivien a character not unlike some 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 35 

of his own, as dark as Becky Sharp, more terrible in 
her selfishness than that Beatrix Esmond who is still 
a paragon, and in her creator's despite, a queen of 
hearts. In Elaine, on the other hand, Tennyson has 
drawn a girl so innocently passionate, and told a tale 
of love that never found his earthly close, so delicately 
beautiful, that we may perhaps place this Idyll the 
highest of his poems on love, and reckon it the gem 
of the Idylls, the central diamond in the diamond 
crown. Reading Elaine once more, after an interval 
of years, one is captivated by its grace, its pathos, its 
nobility. The poet had touched on some unidentified 
form of the story, long before, in The Lady of Sbalott. 
That poem had the mystery of romance, but, in 
human interest, could not compete with Elaine, if in- 
deed any poem of Tennyson's can be ranked with 
this matchless Idyll. 

The mere invention, and, as we may say, charpent- 
age, are of the first order. The materials in Malory, 
though beautiful, are simple, and left a field for the 
poet's invention. 1 

Arthur, with the Scots and Northern knights, means 
to encounter all comers at a Whitsuntide tourney. 
Guinevere is ill, and cannot go to the jousts, while 
Lancelot makes excuse that he is not healed of a 
wound. " Wherefore the King was heavy and pass- 
ing wroth, and so he departed towards Winchester." 
The Queen then blamed Lancelot : people will say 
they deceive Arthur. " Madame," said Sir Lancelot, 
" I allow your wit, it is of late come that ye were 
1 Malory, xviii. 8 et scq. 



I36 TENNYSON 

wise." In the Idyll Guinevere speaks as if their 
early loves had been as conspicuous as, according to 
George Buchanan, were those of Oueen Mary and 
Bothwell. Lancelot will go to the tourney, and, 
despite Guinevere's warning, will take part against 
Arthur and his own fierce Northern kinsmen. He 
rides to Astolat — " that is, Gylford " — where Arthur 
sees him. He borrows the blank shield of "Sir 
Torre," and the company of his brother Sir Lavaine. 
Elaine " cast such a love unto Sir Lancelot that she 
would never withdraw her love, wherefore she died." 
At her prayer, and for better disguise (as he had never 
worn a lady's favour), Lancelot carried her scarlet 
pearl-embroidered sleeve in his helmet, and left his 
shield in Elaine's keeping. The tourney passes as in 
the poem, Gawain recognising Lancelot, but puzzled 
by the favour he wears. The wounded Lancelot 
" thought to do what he might while he might en- 
dure." When he is offered the prize he is so sore 
hurt that he " takes no force of no honour." He 
rides into a wood, where Lavaine draws forth the 
spear. Lavaine brings Lancelot to the hermit, once 
a knight. " I have seen the day," says the hermit, 
" I would have loved him the worse, because he was 
against my lord, King Arthur, for some time. I was 
one of the fellowship of the Round Table, but I 
thank God now I am otherwise disposed." Gawain, 
seeking the wounded knight, comes to Astolat, where 
Elaine declares "he is the man in the world that I 
first loved, and truly he is the last that ever I shall 
love." Gawain, on seeing the shield, tells Elaine 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 37 

that the wounded knight is Lancelot, and she goes to 
seek him and Lavaine. Gawain does not pay court 
to Elaine, nor does Arthur rebuke him, as in the 
poem. When Guinevere heard that Lancelot bore 
another lady's favour, " she was nigh out of her mind 
for wrath," and expressed her anger to Sir Bors, for 
Gawain had spoken of the maid of Astolat. Bors 
tells this to Lancelot, who is tended by Elaine. 
" ' But I well see,' said Sir Bors, c by her diligence 
about you that she loveth you entirely.' ' That me 
repenteth,' said Sir Lancelot. Said Sir Bors, 'Sir, she 
is not the first that hath lost her pain upon you, and 
that is the more pity.' ' When Lancelot recovers, 
and returns to Astolat, she declares her love with the 
frankness of ladies in mediaeval romance. " Have 
mercy upon me and suffer me not to die for thy love." 
Lancelot replies with the courtesy and the offers of 
service which became him. " Of all this," said the 
maiden, " I will none ; for but if ye will wed me, or 
be my paramour at the least, wit you well, Sir Lance- 
lot, my good days are done." 

This was a difficult pass for the poet, living in other 
days of other manners. His art appears in the turn 
which he gives to Elaine's declaration : — 

" But when Sir Lancelot's deadly hurt was whole, 
To Astolat returning rode the three. 
There morn by morn, arraying her sweet self 
In that wherein she deem'd she look'd her best, 
She came before Sir Lancelot, for she thought 
' If I be loved, these are my festal robes, 
If not, the victim's flowers before he fall.' 



•3» 



TENNYSON 

And Lancelot ever prest upon the maid 
That she should ask some goodly gift of him 
For her own self or hers ; ' and do not shun 
To speak the wish most near to your true heart ; 
Such service have ye done me, that I make 
My will of yours, and Prince and Lord am I 
In mine own land, and what I will 1 can.' 
Then like a ghost she lifted up her face, 
But like a ghost wilhout the power to speak. 
And Lancelot saw that she withheld her wish, 
And bode among them yet a little space 
Till he should learn it ; and one morn it chanced 
He found her in among the garden yews, 
And said, * Delay no longer, speak your wish, 
Seeing I go to-day ' : then out she brake : 
' Going ? and we shall never see you more. 
And I must die for want of one bold word.' 

* Speak : that I live to hear,' he said, * is yours.' 
Then suddenly and passionately she spoke : 

' I have gone mad. I love you : let me die.' 

* Ah, sister,' answer'd Lancelot, * what is this ? ' 
And innocently extending her white arms, 

' Your love,' she said, ' your love — to be your wife.' 
And Lancelot answer'd, * Had I chosen to wed, 
I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine : 
But now there never will be wife of mine.' , 

* No, no,' she cried, ' 1 care not to be wife, 
But to be with you still, to see your face, 

To serve you, and to follow you thro' the world.' 
And Lancelot answer'd, ' Nay, the world, the world, 
All ear and eye, with such a stupid heart 
To interpret ear and eye, and such a tongue 
To blare its own interpretation — nay, 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 1 39 

Full ill then should I quit your brother's love, 
And your good father's kindness.' And she said, 
' Not to be with you, not to see your face — 
Alas for me then, my good days are done.' " 

So she dies, and is borne down Thames to London, 
the fairest corpse, cc and she lay as though she had • 
smiled." Her letter is read. " Ye might have 
showed her," said the Queen, " some courtesy and 
gentleness that might have preserved her life ; " and 
so the two are reconciled. 

Such, in brief, is the tender old tale of true love, 
with the shining courtesy of Lavaine and the father 
of the maid, who speak no word of anger against 
Lancelot. " For since first I saw my lord, Sir 
Lancelot," says Lavaine, " I could never depart from 
him, nor nought I will, if I may follow him : she 
doth as I do." To the simple and moving story 
Tennyson adds, by way of ornament, the diamonds, 
the prize of the tourney, and the manner of their 
finding : — 

" For Arthur, long before they crovvn'd him King, 
Roving the trackless realms of Lyonnesse, 
Had found a glen, gray boulder and black tarn. 
A horror lived about the tarn, and clave 
Like its own mists to all the mountainside : 
For here two brothers, one a king, had met 
And fought together ; but their names were lost ; 
And each had slain his brother at a blow ; 
And down they fell and made the glen abhorr'd : 
And there they lay till all their bones were bleach'd, 



I4O TENNYSON 

And lichen'd into colour with the crags : 

And he, that once was king, had on a crown 

Of diamonds, one in front, and four aside. 

And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass, 

All in a misty moonshine, unawares 

Had trodden that crown'd skeleton, and the skull 

Brake from the nape, and from the skull the crown 

Roll'd into light, and turning on its rims 

Fled like a glittering rivulet to the tarn : 

And down the shingly scaur he plunged, and caught, 

And set it on his head, and in his heart 

Heard murmurs, * Lo, thou likewise shalt be King.' " 

The diamonds reappear in the scene of Guinevere's 
jealousy : — 

" All in an oriel on the summer side, 
Vine-clad, of Arthur's palace towards the stream, 
They met, and Lancelot kneeling utter'd, * Queen, 
Lady, my liege, in whom I have my joy, 
Take, what I had not won except for you, 
These jewels, and make me happy, making them 
An armlet for the roundest arm on earth, 
Or necklace for a neck to which the swan's 
Is tawnier than her cygnet's : these are words : 
Your beauty is your beauty, and I sin 
In speaking, yet O grant my worship of it 
Words, as we grant grief tears. Such sin in words 
Perchance, w r e both can pardon : but, my Oueen, 
I hear of rumours flying thro' your court. 
Our bond, as not the bond of man and wife, 
Should have in it an absolutcr trust 
To make up that defect : let rumours be : 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I4I 

When did not rumours fly ? these, as I trust 
That you trust me in your own nobleness, 
I may not well believe that you believe.' 

While thus he spoke, half turn'd away, the Queen 
Brake from the vast oriel-embowering vine 
Leaf after leaf, and tore, and cast them off, 
Till all the place whereon she stood was green ; 
Then, when he ceased, in one cold passive hand 
Received at once and laid aside the gems 
There on a table near her, and replied : 

* It may be, I am quicker of belief 
Then you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake. 
Our bond is not the bond of man and wife. 
This good is in it, whatsoe'er of ill, 
It can be broken easier. I for you 
This many a year have done despite and wrong 
To one whom ever in my heart of hearts 
I did acknowledge nobler. What are these ? 
Diamonds for me ! they had been thrice their worth 
Being your gift, had you not lost your own. 
To loyal hearts the value of all gifts 
Must vary as the giver's. Not for me ! 
For her ! for your new fancy. Only this 
Grant me, I pray you : have your joys apart. 
I doubt not that however changed, you keep 
So much of what is graceful : and myself 
Would shun to break those bounds of courtesy 
In which as Arthur's Queen I move and rule : 
So cannot speak my mind. An end to this ! 
A strange one ! yet I take it with Amen. 
So pray you, add my diamonds to her pearls ; 



I42 TENNYSON 

Deck her with these ; tell her, she shines me down 

An armlet for an arm to which the Queen's 

Is haggard, or a necklace for a neck 

O as much fairer — as a faith once fair 

Was richer that these diamonds — hers not mine — 

Nay, by the mother of our Lord himself, 

Or hers or mine, mine now to work my will — 

She shall not have them.' 



Saying which she seized, 
And, thro* the casement standing wide for heat, 
Flung them, and down they flash'd, and smote the stream. 
Then from the smitten surface flash'd, as it were, 
Diamonds to meet them, and they past away. 
Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain 
At love, life, all things, on the window ledge, 
Close underneath his eyes, and right across 
Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge 
Whereon the lily maid of Astolat 
Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night." 



This affair of the diamonds is the chief addition to 
the old tale, in which we already see the curse of 
lawless love, fallen upon the jealous Queen and the 
long-enduring Lancelot. " This is not the first 
time," said Sir Lancelot, " that ye have been dis- 
pleased with me causeless, but, madame, ever I must 
suffer you, but what sorrow I endure I take no force " 
(that is, " I disregard "). 

The romance, and the poet, in his own despite, 
cannot but make Lancelot the man we love, not 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I43 

Arthur or another. Human nature perversely sides 
with Guinevere against the Blameless King : — 

" She broke into a little scornful laugh : 
* Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King, 
That passionate perfection, my good lord — 
But who can gaze upon the Sun in heaven ? 
He never spake word of reproach to me, 
He never had a glimpse of mine untruth, 
He cares not for me : only here to-day 
There gleam'd a vague suspicion in his eyes : 
Some meddling rogue has tamper'd with him — else 
Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round, 
And swearing men to vows impossible, 
To make them like himself: but, friend, to me 
He is all fault who hath no fault at all : 
For who loves me must have a touch of earth ; 
The low sun makes the colour : I am yours, 
Not Arthur's, as ye know, save by the bond." 

It is not the beautiful Queen who wins us, our hearts 
are with " the innocence of love " in Elaine. But 
Lancelot has the charm that captivated Lavaine ; and 
Tennyson's Arthur remains 

" The moral child without the craft to rule, 
Else had he not lost me." 

Indeed the romance of Malory makes Arthur deserve 
" the pretty popular name such manhood earns " by 
his conduct as regards Guinevere when she is accused 
by her enemies in the later chapters. Yet Malory 
does not finally condone the sin which baffles Lance- 
lot's quest of the Holy Grail. 



144 TENNYSON 

Tennyson at first was in doubt as to writing on the 
Grail, for certain respects, of reverence. When he 
did approach the theme it was in a method of extreme 
condensation. The romances on the Grail outrun 
the length even of mediaeval poetry and prose. They 
are exceedingly confused, as was natural, if that 
hypothesis which regards the story as a Christianised 
form of obscure Celtic myth be correct. Sir Per- 
civale's sister, in the Idyll, has the first vision of the 
Grail : — 

" Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail : 
For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound 
As of a silver horn from o'er the hills 
Blown, and I thought, ' It is not Arthur's use 
To hunt by moonlight ' ; and the slender sound 
As from a distance beyond distance grew 
Coming upon me — O never harp nor horn, 
Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with hand, 
Was like that music as it came ; and then 
Stream'd thro' my cell a cold and silver beam, 
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail, 
Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive, 
Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed 
With rosy colours leaping on the wall ; 
And then the music faded, and the Grail 
Past, and the beam decay'd, and from the walls 
The rosy quiverings died into the night. 
So now the Holy Thing is here again 
Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray, 
And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray, 
That so perchance the vision may be seen 
Bv thee and those, and all the world be heal'd." 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I45 

Galahad, son of Lancelot and the first Elaine (who 
became Lancelot's mistress by art magic), then vows 
himself to the Quest, and, after the vision in hall at 
Camelot, the knights, except Arthur, follow his ex- 
ample, to Arthur's grief. " Ye follow wandering 
fires ! " Probably, or perhaps, the poet indicates dis- 
like of hasty spiritual enthusiasms, of " seeking for a 
sign," and of the mysticism which betokens want of 
faith. The Middle Ages, more than many readers 
know, were ages of doubt. Men desired the witness 
of the senses to the truth of what the Church taught, 
they wished to see that naked child of the romance 
"smite himself into" the wafer of the Sacrament. 
The author of the Imitatio Christi discourages such 
vain and too curious inquiries as helped to rend the 
Church, and divided Christendom into hostile camps. 
The Quest of the actual Grail was a knightly form 
of theological research into the unsearchable ; under- 
taken, often in a secular spirit of adventure, by sinful 
men. The poet's heart is rather with human 
things : — 

" ' O brother/ ask'd Ambrosius, — ' for in sooth 
These ancient books — and they would win thee — teem, 
Only I find not there this Holy Grail, 
With miracles and marvels like to these, 
Not all unlike ; which oftentime I read, 
Who read but on my breviary with ease, 
Till my head swims ; and then go forth and pass 
Down to the little thorpe that lies so close, 
And almost plaster'd like a martin's nest 
To these old walls — and mingle with our folk ; 



146 TENNYSON 

And knowing every honest face of theirs 
As well as ever shepherd knew his sheep, 
And every homely secret in their hearts, 
Delight myself with gossip and old wives, 
And ills and aches, and teethings, lyings-in, 
And mirthful sayings, children of the place, 
That have no meaning half a league away : 
Or lulling random squabbles when they rise, 
Charrerings and chatterings at the market-cross, 
Rejoice, small man, in this small world of mine, 
Yea, even in their hens and in their eggs.' " 

This appears to be Tennyson's original reading of the 
Quest of the Grail. His own mysticism, which did 
not strive, or cry, or seek after marvels, though mar- 
vels might come unsought, is expressed in Arthur's 
words : — 

" ' " And spake I not too truly, O my knights ? 
Was I too dark a prophet when I said 
To those who went upon the Holy Quest, 
That most of them would follow wandering fires, 
Lost in the quagmire ? — lost to me and gone, 
And left me gazing at a barren board, 
And a lean Order — scarce return'd a tithe — 
And out of those to whom the vision came 
My greatest hardly will believe he saw ; 
Another hath beheld it afar off, 
And leaving human wrongs to right themselves, 
Cares but to pass into the silent life. 
And one hath had the vision face to face, 
And now his chair desires him here in vain, 
However they may crown him otherwhere. 



THE IDYLL OF THE KINO 147 

' " And borne among you he! , 1 : :he King 
Had seen the would hav : 

ang that the King most guard 
i is bur as the hind 
I /.horn a space ofland is 

^der from the allotted field 
Before his work be done ; but, being done, 
Let visions of the night or of the day 
C me, as they will ; and many a time they come, 
Until this earth he 

This light that strikes his eyeball is not light. 
This air that smites his forehead is not air 
But vision — yea, hio \try hand and foot — 
In moments when he feels he cannot die, 
And knows himself no himself, 

Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 

j rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen." 

* So spake the King : I knew no: all he meant.' " 

The closing lines declare, as far as the poet could de- 
clare them, these subjective experiences of his which, 
in a manner rarelv paralleled, coloured and formed his 
thought on the highest things. He introduces them 
even into this poem on a topic which, because of its 
sacred associations, he for long did not venture to 
touch. 

In Pelleas and Ettarre — which deals with the 
of one of the voung knight fill up the gaps 

left at the Round Table by the mischances of the 
Q ues t — it would be difficult to trace a Celtic original. 
For Malory, not Celtic legend, supplied Ten; 



I48 TENNYSON 

with the germinal idea of a poem which, in the ro- 
mance, has no bearing on the final catastrophe. Pel- 
leas, a King of the Isles, loves the beautiful Ettarre, 
" a great lady," and for her wins at a tourney the 
prize of the golden circlet. But she hates and de- 
spises him, and Sir Garwain is a spectator when, as in 
the poem, the felon knights of Ettarre bind and insult 
their conqueror, Pelleas. Gawain promises to win the 
love of Ettarre for Pelleas, and, as in the poem, bor- 
rows his arms and horse, and pretends to have slain 
him. But in place of turning Ettarre's heart towards 
Pelleas, Gawain becomes her lover, and Pelleas, de- 
tecting them asleep, lays his naked sword on their 
necks. He then rides home to die ; but Nimue 
(Vivien), the Lady of the Lake, restores him to health 
and sanity. His fever gone, he scorns Ettarre, who, 
by Nimue's enchantment, now loves him as much as 
she had hated him. Pelleas weds Nimue, and Ettarre 
dies of a broken heart. Tennyson, of course, could 
not make Nimue (his Vivien) do anything benevolent. 
He therefore closes his poem by a repetition of the 
effect in the case of Balin. Pelleas is driven desper- 
ate by the treachery of Gawain, the reported infidelity 
of Guinevere, and the general corruption of the ideal. 
A shadow falls on Lancelot and Guinevere, and 
Modred sees that his hour is drawing nigh. In spite 
of beautiful passages this is not one of the finest of 
the Idylls, save for the study of the fierce, hateful, and 
beautiful grande dame, Ettarre. The narrative does 
little to advance the general plot. In the original of 
Malory it has no connection with the Lancelot cycle, 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I49 

except as far as it reveals the treachery of Gawain, 
the gay and fair-spoken " light of love," brother of the 
traitor Modred. A simpler treatment of the theme 
may be read in Mr. Swinburne's beautiful poem, The 
Tale of Balen. 

It is in The Last Tournament that Modred finds the 
beginning of his opportunity. The brief life of the 
Ideal has burned itself out, as the year, in its vernal 
beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn. 
The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, 
not of mellow fruitfulness, but of the " flying gold of 
the ruined woodlands " and the dank odours of decay. 
In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the 
Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. 
With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the 
Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into 
positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament 
is a carnival of the "smart," and the third-rate. 
Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in 
Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of 
her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the 
world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It 
is a passage of arms neither gentle nor joyous that 
Lancelot presides over : — 

" The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream 
To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll 
Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began : 
And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf 
And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume 
Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one 



I5O TENNYSON 

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire, 

When all the goodlier guests are past away, 

Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists. 

He saw the laws that ruled the tournament 

Broken, but spake not ; once, a knight cast down 

Before his throne of arbitration cursed 

The dead babe and the follies of the King ; 

And once the laces of a helmet crack'd, 

And show'd him like a vermin in its hole, 

Modred, a narrow face : anon he heard 

The voice that billow'd round the barriers roar 

An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight, 

But newly-enter'd, taller than the rest, 

And armour'd all in forest green, whereon 

There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, 

And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, 

With ever-scattering berries, and on shield 

A spear, a harp, a bugle — Tristram — late 

From overseas in Brittany return'd, 

And marriage with a princess of that realm, 

Isolt the white — Sir Tristram of the Woods — 

Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain 

His own against him, and now yearn'd to shake 

The burthen off his heart in one full shock 

With Tristram ev'n to death : his strong hands gript 

And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, 

Until he groan'd for wrath — so many of those, 

That ware their ladies' colours on the casque, 

Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds, 

And there with gibes and flickering mockeries 

Stood, while he mutter'd, « Craven crests ! O shame ! 

What faith have these in whom they swear to love ? 

The glory of our Round Table is no more.' 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I5I 

So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems, 
Not speaking other word than * Hast thou won ? 
Art thou the purest, brother ? See, the hand 
Wherewith thou takest this, is red ! ' to whom 
Tristram, half-plagued by Lancelot's languorous mood, 
Made answer, * Ay, but wherefore toss me this 
Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound ? 
Let be thy fair Queen's fantasy. Strength of heart 
And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, 
Are winners in this pastime of our King. 
My hand — belike the lance hath dript upon it — 
No blood of mine, I trow ; but O chief knight, 
Right arm of Arthur in the battle-field, 
Great brother, thou nor I have made the world ; 
Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.' 

And Tristram round the gallery made his horse 
Caracole ; then bow'd his homage, bluntly saying, 
* Fair damsels, each to him who worships each 
Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold 
This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.' 
And most of these were mute, some anger'd, one 
Murmuring, ' All courtesy is dead,' and one, 
'The glory of our Round Table is no more.' 

Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, 
And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day 
Went glooming down in wet and weariness : 
But under her black brows a swarthy one 
Laugh'd shrilly, crying, « Praise the patient saints, 
Our one white day of Innocence hath past, 
Tho' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. 
The snowdrop only, flowering thro' the year, 



152 TENNYSON 

Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide. 
Come — let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen's 
And Lancelot's, at this night's solemnity 
With all the kindlier colours of the field.' " 

Arthur's last victory over a robber knight is inglo- 
riously squalid : — 

" He ended : Arthur knew the voice ; the face 
Well-nigh was helmet-hidden, and the name 
Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. 
And Arthur deign'd not use of word or sword, 
But let the drunkard, as he stretch'd from horse 
To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, 
Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp 
Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, 
Heard in dead night along that table-shore, 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, 
From less and less to nothing ; thus he fell 
Head-heavy ; then the knights, who watch'd him, roar'd 
And shouted and leapt down upon the fall'n ; 
There trampled out his face from being known, 
And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves : 
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang 
Thro' open doors, and swording right and left 
Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd 
The tables over and the wines, and slew 
Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, 
And all the pavement stream'd with massacre : 
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, 
Which half that autumn night, like the live North, 
Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor, 



THE IDYLLS OF THE KING I53 

Made all above it, and a hundred meres 
About it, as the water Moab saw- 
Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush'd 
The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea." 

Guinevere is one of the greatest of the Idylls. 
Malory makes Lancelot more sympathetic ; his fight, 
unarmed, in Guinevere's chamber, against the felon 
knights, is one of his most spirited scenes. Tenny- 
son omits this, and omits all the unpardonable be- 
haviour of Arthur as narrated in Malory. Critics 
have usually condemned the last parting of Guinevere 
and Arthur, because the King doth preach too much 
to an unhappy woman who has no reply. The posi- 
tion of Arthur is not easily redeemable : it is difficult 
to conceive that a noble nature could be, or should be, 
blind so long. He does rehabilitate his Queen in her 
own self-respect, perhaps, by assuring her that he 
loves her still : — 

"Let no man dream but that I love thee still. " 

Had he said that one line and no more, we might 
have loved him better. In the Idylls we have not 
Malory's last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, 
one of the scenes in which the wandering composite 
romance ends as nobly as the Iliad. 

The Passing of Arthur, except for a new introduc- 
tory passage of great beauty and appropriateness, is 
the Morte d y Arthur, first published in 1842: — 

" So all day long the noise of battle roll'd 
Among the mountains by the winter sea." 



154 TENNYSON 

The year has run its course, spring, summer, gloomy 
autumn, and dies in the mist of Arthur's last wintry 
battle in the west — 

"And the new sun rose, bringing the new year." 

The splendid and sombre procession has passed, leaving 
us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own 
ideal. There could be no new epic : he gave a chain 
of heroic Idylls. An epic there could not be, for the 
Iliad and Odyssey have each a unity of theme, a nar- 
rative compressed into a few days in the former, in 
the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of 
Arthur's reign could not so be condensed ; and 
Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left 
a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he 
conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he 
desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on 
the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in 
the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each 
with its own glory. 



VIII 

ENOCH ARDEN. THE DRAMAS 

The success of the first volume of the Idylls rec- 
ompensed the poet for the slings and arrows that gave 
Maud a hostile welcome. His next publication was 
the beautiful Tithonus, a fit pendant to the Ulysses, and 
composed about the same date (1833-35). "A 
quarter of a century ago," Tennyson dates it, writing 
in i860 to the Duke of Argyll. He had found it 
when "ferreting among my old books," he said, in 
search of something for Thackeray, who was estab- 
lishing the Cornhill Magazine. What must the wealth 
of the poet have been, who, possessing Tithonus in 
his portfolio, did not take the trouble to insert it in 
the volumes of 1842 ! Nobody knows how many 
poems of Tennyson's never even saw pen and ink, 
being composed unwritten, and forgotten. At this 
time we find him recommending Mr. Browning's 
Men and Women to the Duke, who, like many 
Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready 
convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and 
Duchess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of 
the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood. Indeed 
the vision of the Grail in the early Sir Galahad is 
doubtless happier than the allegorical handling of a 
theme so obscure, remote, and difficult, in the Idylls. 

*55 



I56 TENNYSON 

He wrote his Boadicea, a piece magnificent in itself, 
but of difficult popular access, owing to the metrical 
experiment. 

In the autumn of i860 he revisited Cornwall with 
F. T. Palgrave, Mr. Val Prinsep, and Mr. Holman 
Hunt. They walked in the rain, saw Tintagel and 
the Scilly Isles, and were feted by an enthusiastic cap- 
tain of a little river steamer, who was more interested 
in " Mr. Tinman and Mr. Pancake " than the Celtic 
boatman of Ardtornish. The winter was passed at 
Farringford, and the Northern Farmer was written 
there, a Lincolnshire reminiscence, in the February 
of 1861. In autumn the Pyrenees were visited by 
Tennyson in company with Arthur Clough and Mr. 
Dakyns of Clifton College. At Cauteretz in August, 
and among memories of the old tour with Arthur 
Hallam, was written All along the Valley. The ways, 
however, in Auvergne were " foul," and the diet 
" unhappy." The dedication of the Idylls was writ- 
ten on the death of Prince Consort in December, and 
in January, 1862, the Ode for the opening of an ex- 
hibition. The poet was busy with his " Fisherman," 
Enoch Arden. The volume was published in 1864, 
and Lord Tennyson says it has been, next to In 
Memoriam, the most popular of his father's works. 
One would have expected the one volume containing 
the poems up to 1842 to hold that place. The new 
book, however, mainly dealt with English, contem- 
porary, and domestic themes : " the poetry of the 
affections." An old woman, a district visitor re- 
ported, regarded Enoch Arden as " more beautiful " 



ENOCH ARDEN 157 

than the other tracts which were read to her. It is 
indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk- 
story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as 
well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown 
landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by 
the poet's imagination than the familiar English cliffs 
and hazel copses : — 

" The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns 
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, 
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, 
The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 
The lustre of the long convolvuluses 
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran 
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows 
And glories of the broad belt of the world, 
All these he saw ; but what he fain had seen 
He could not see, the kindly human face, 
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard 
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep 
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, 
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, 
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail : 
No sail from day to day, but every day 
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 
The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 



I58 TENNYSON 

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 

Aylmers Field somewhat recalls the burden of 
Maud, the curse of purse-proud wealth, but is too 
gloomy to be a fair specimen of Tennyson's art. In 
Sea Dreams (first published in i860) the awful vision 
of crumbling faiths is somewhat out of harmony with 
its environment : — 

" But round the North, a light, 
A belt, it seem'd, of luminous vapour, lay, 
And ever in it a low musical note 
Swell'd up and died ; and, as it swell'd, a ridge 
Of breaker issued from the belt, and still 
Grew with the growing note, and when the note 
Had reach'd a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs 
Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that 
Living within the belt) whereby she saw 
That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, 
But huge cathedral fronts of every age, 
Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, 
One after one : and then the great ridge drew, 
Lessening to the lessening music, back, 
And past into the belt and swell'd again 
Slowly to music : ever when it broke 
The statues, king or saint, or founder fell ; 
Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left 
Came men and women in dark clusters round, 
Some crying, * Set them up ! they shall not fall ! ' 
And others, ' Let them lie, for they have fall'n.' 
And still they strove and wrangled : and she grieved 



ENOCH ARDEN I 59 

In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find 
Their wildest wailings never out of tune 
With that sweet note ; and ever as their shrieks 
Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave 
Returning, while none mark'd it, on the crowd 
Broke, mixt with awful light, and show'd their eyes 
Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away 
The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, 
To the waste deeps together. 

* Then I fixt 
My wistful eyes on two fair images, 
Both crown'd with stars and high among the stars, — 
The Virgin Mother standing with her child 
High up on one of those dark minster-fronts — 
Till she began to totter, and the child 
Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry 
Which mixt with little Margaret's, and I woke, 
And my dream awed me : — well — but what are 
dreams ? ' " 

The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood 
of Arthur, in the Idylls, than for the wife of the city 
clerk ruined by a pious rogue. 

The Lucretius, later published, is beyond praise as 
a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose 
heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed. 
Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by 
the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly 
treated in the mad scenes of Maud. No prose com- 
mentary on the De Rerum Natura, however long and 
learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in 



l60 TENNYSON 

verse the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the 
mind and poem of the Roman. 

The " Experiments in Quantity " were, perhaps, 
suggested by Mr. Matthew Arnold's Lectures on the 
Translating of Homer. Mr. Arnold believed in a 
translation into English hexameters. His negative 
criticism of other translators and translations was 
amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play 
with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W. Newman, the 
ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and 
clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies 
of Chapman. But Mr. Arnold's hexameters were 
neither musical nor rapid : they only exhibited a new 
form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to 
his tutor, " Enough, you have convinced me that no 
man can be a poet," so Mr. Arnold went some way 
to prove that no man can translate Homer. 

Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexameters as 
an English metre for serious purposes. 

" These lame hexameters the strong-wing'd music of 
Homer ! " 

Lord Tennyson says, " German hexameters he dis- 
liked even more than English." Indeed there is not 
much room for preference. Tennyson's Alcaics 
{Milton) were intended to follow the Greek rather 
than the Horatian model, and resulted, at all events, 
in a poem worthy of the " mighty-mouth'd inventor 
of harmonies." The specimen of the Iliad in blank 
verse, beautiful as it is, does not, somehow, reproduce 



ENOCH ARDEN l6l 

the music of Homer. It is entirely Tennysonian, 
as in 

" Roll'd the rich vapour far into the heaven." 

The reader, in that one line, recognises the voice and 
trick of the English poet, and is far away from the 
Chian : — 

" As when in heaven the stars about the moon 
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, 
And every height comes out, and jutting peak 
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens 
Break open to their highest, and all the stars 
Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart : 
So many a fire between the ships and stream 
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, 
A thousand on the plain ; and close by each 
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire ; 
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds, 
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn." 

This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of 
Pope (who never " wrote with his eye on the object "), 
but is pure Tennyson. We have not yet, probably 
we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the 
Iliad into verse, and prose translations do not pretend 
to be adequate. When parents and dominies have 
abolished the study of Greek, something, it seems, 
will have been lost to the world ; something which 
even Tennyson could not restore in English. He 
thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is 
no equivalent. One even prefers his own prose : — 



l6l TENNYSON 

Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had 
girt on his gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he 
rushed thro' the city, glorying in his airy feet. And as when 
a stall-kept horse, that is barley-fed at the manger, breaketh 
his tether, and dasheth thro' the plain, spurning it, being 
wont to bathe himself in the fair-running river, rioting, and 
reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on either shoulder, 
and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear him at the 
gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares ; so ran the 
son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in 
arms, glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, 
and his swift feet bare him. 

In February, 1865, Tennyson lost the mother whose 
portrait he drew in Isabel; "a thing enskied and 
sainted." 

In the autumn of 1865 the Tennysons went on a 
Continental tour, and visited Waterloo, Weimar, and 
Dresden ; in September they entertained Emma I, 
Queen of the Sandwich Islands. The months passed 
quietly at home or in town. The poet had written 
his Lucretius, and, to please Sir George Grove, wrote 
The Song of the Wrens, for music. Tennyson had 
not that positive aversion to music which marked Dr. 
Johnson, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and some 
other poets. Nay, he liked Beethoven, which places 
him higher in the musical scale than Scott, who did 
not rise above a Border lilt or a Jacobite ditty. The 
Wren songs, entitled The Window, were privately 
printed by Sir Ivor Guest in 1867, were set to music 
by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and published by Strahan in 
December, 1870. "A puppet," Tennyson called the 



ENOCH ARDEN 163 

song-book, " whose only merit is, perhaps, that it can 
dance to Mr. Sullivan's instrument. I am sorry that 
my puppet should have to dance at all in the dark 
shadow of these days " (the siege of Paris), " but the 
music is now completed, and I am bound by my 
promise." The verses are described as " partly in 
the old style," but the true old style of the Eliza- 
bethan and cavalier days is lost. 

In the summer of 1867 the Tennysons moved to a 
farmhouse near Haslemere, at that time not a centre 
of literary Londoners. " Sandy soil and heather- 
scented air " allured them, and the result was the 
purchase of land, and the building of Aldworth, Mr. 
Knowles being the architect. In autumn Tennyson 
visited Lyme Regis, and, like all other travelers 
thither, made a pilgrimage to the Cobb, sacred to 
Louisa Musgrove. The poet now began the study 
of Hebrew, having a mind to translate the Book of 
Job, a vision unfulfilled. In 1868 he thought of pub- 
lishing his boyish piece, The Lover s Tale, but de- 
layed. An anonymously edited piracy of this and 
other poems was perpetrated in 1875, limited, at least 
nominally, to fifty copies. 

In July Longfellow visited Tennyson. " The 
Longfellows and he talked much of spiritualism, for 
he was greatly interested in that subject, but he sus- 
pended his judgment, and thought that, if in such 
manifestations there is anything, ' Pucks, not the 
spirits of dead men, reveal themselves.' " This was 
Southey's suggestion, as regards the celebrated dis- 
turbances in the house of the Wesleys. " Wit might 



164 TENNYSON 

have much to say, wisdom, little," said Sam Wesley. 
Probably the talk about David Dunglas Home, the 
" medium" then in vogue, led to the discussion of 
" spiritualism." We do not hear that Tennyson ever 
had the curiosity to see Home, whom Mr. Browning 
so firmly detested. 

In September The Holy Grail was begun : it was 
finished " in about a week. It came like a breath of 
inspiration." The subject had for many years been 
turned about in the poet's mind, which, of course, was 
busy in these years of apparent inactivity. At this 
time (August, 1868) Tennyson left his old publishers, 
the Moxons, for Mr. Strahan, who endured till 1872. 
Then he was succeeded by Messrs. H. S. King & Co., 
who gave place (1879) to Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co., 
while in 1884 Messrs. Macmillan became, and con- 
tinue to be, the publishers. A few pieces, except 
Lucretius (Macmillan s Magazine, May, 1868), unim- 
portant, appeared in serials. 

Very early in 1869 The Coming of Arthur was 
composed, while Tennyson was reading Browning's 
The Ring and the Book. He and his great contem- 
porary were on terms of affectionate friendship, 
though Tennyson, perhaps, appreciated less of Brown- 
ing than Browning of Tennyson. Meanwhile " Old 
Fitz " kept up a fire of unsympathetic growls at 
Browning and all his works. "I have been trying in 
vain to read it" (The Ring and the Book), "and yet 
the Athenceum tells me it is wonderfully fine." Fitz- 
Gerald's ply had been taken long ago ; he wanted 
verbal music in poetry (no exorbitant desire), while, 



ENOCH ARDEN 165 

in Browning, carmina desunt. Perhaps, too, a per- 
sonal feeling, as if Browning was Tennyson's rival, 
affected the judgment of the author of Omar Khayyam. 
We may almost call him " the author." 

The Holy Grail, with the smaller poems, such as 
Lucretius, was published at the end of 1869. Fitz- 
Gerald appears to have preferred The Northern 
Farmer, " the substantial rough-spun nature I knew," 
to all the visionary knights in the airy Quest. To 
compare " " (obviously Browning) with Tenny- 
son, was " to compare an old Jew's curiosity shop 
with the Phidian Marbles." Tennyson's poems 
" being clear to the bottom as well as beautiful, do not 
seem to cockney eyes so deep as muddy waters." 

In November, 1870, The Last Tournament was be- 
gun; it was finished in May, 1871. Conceivably the 
vulgar scandals of the last days of the French Im- 
perial regime may have influenced Tennyson's picture 
of the corruption of Arthur's Court ; but the Empire 
did not begin, like the Round Table, with aspirations 
after the Ideal. In the autumn of the year Tenny- 
son entertained, and was entertained by, Mr. Huxley. 
In their ideas about ultimate things two men could not 
vary more widely, but each delighted in the other's 
society. In the spring of 1872 Tennyson visited 
Paris and the ruins of the Louvre. He read Victor 
Hugo, and Alfred de Musset, whose comedies he ad- 
mired. The little that we hear of his opinion of the 
other great poet runs to this effect, " Victor Hugo is 
an unequal genius, sometimes sublime ; he reminds 
one that there is but one step between the sublime 



1 66 TENNYSON 

and the ridiculous," but the example by which 
Tennyson illustrated this was derived from one of the 
poet's novels. In these we meet not only the sublime 
and the ridiculous, but passages which leave us in 
some perplexity as to their true category. One would 
have expected Hugo's lyrics to be Tennyson's favour- 
ites, but only Gastibelza is mentioned in that char- 
acter. At this time Tennyson was vexed by 

" Art with poisonous honey stolen from France," 

a phrase which cannot apply to Hugo. Meanwhile 
Gareth was being written, and the. knight's song for 
The Coming of Arthur. Gareth and Lynette, with 
minor pieces, appeared in 1872. Balin and Balan 
was composed later, to lead up to Vivien, to which, 
perhaps, Balin and Balan was introduction sufficient 
had it been the earlier written. But the Idylls have 
already been discussed as arranged in sequence. The 
completion of the Idylls, with the patriotic epilogue, 
was followed by the offer of a baronetcy. Tennyson 
preferred that he and his wife " should remain plain 
Mr. and Mrs.," though " I hope that I have too much 
of the old-world loyalty not to wear my lady's favours 
against all comers, should you think that it would be 
more agreeable to her Majesty that I should do so." 

The Idylls ended, Tennyson in 1874 began to con- 
template a drama, choosing the topic, perhaps neither 
popular nor in an Aristotelian sense tragic, of Mary 
Tudor. This play was published, and put on the 
stage by Sir Henry Irving in 1875. Harold followed 
in 1876, The Cup in 1881 (at the Lyceum), The 



THE DRAMAS 167 

Promise of May (at the Globe) in 1882, Becket in 
1884, with The Foresters in 1892. It seems best to 
consider all the dramatic period of Tennyson's work, 
a period reached so strangely late in his career, in the 
sequence of the Plays. The task is one from which 
I shrink, as conscious of entire ignorance of the stage 
and of lack of enthusiasm for the drama. Great 
dramatic authors have, almost invariably, had long 
practical knowledge of the scenes and of what is be- 
hind them. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, 
Moliere and his contemporaries, had lived their lives 
on the boards and in they^r, actors themselves, or 
in daily touch with actors and actresses. In the pres- 
ent day successful playwrights appear to live much in 
the world of the players. They have practical 
knowledge of the conventions and conditions which 
the stage imposes. Neither Browning nor Mr. 
Swinburne (to take great names) has had, it seems, 
much of this practical and daily experience ; their 
dramas have been acted but rarely, if at all, and 
many examples prove that neither poetical genius nor 
the genius for prose fiction can enable men to pro- 
duce plays which hold their own on the boards. 
This may be the fault of public taste, or partly of 
public taste, partly of defect in practical knowledge 
on the side of the authors. Of the stage, by way of 
practice, Tennyson had known next to nothing, yet 
his dramas were written to be acted, and acted some 
of them were. " For himself, he was aware," says 
his biographer, " that he wanted intimate knowledge 
of the mechanical details necessary for the modern 



l68 TENNYSON 

stage, although in early and middle life he had been a 
constant playgoer, and would keenly follow the ac- 
tion of a play, criticising the characterisation, in- 
cidents, scenic effects, situations, language, and 
dramatic points." He was quite prepared to be 
"edited" for acting purposes by the players. Miss 
Mary Anderson says that " he was ready to sacrifice 
even his most beautiful lines for the sake of a real 
dramatic effect." 

This proved unusual common-sense in a poet. 
Modern times and manners are notoriously unfavour- 
able to the serious drama. In the age of the Greek 
tragedians, as in the days of " Eliza and our James," 
reading was not very common, and life was much 
more passed in public than among ourselves when 
people go to the play for light recreation, or to be 
shocked. So various was the genius of Tennyson, 
that had he devoted himself early to the stage, and 
had he been backed by a manager with the enterprise 
and intelligence of Sir Henry Irving, it is impossible 
to say how much he might have done to restore the 
serious drama. But we cannot regret that he was 
occupied in his prime with other things, nor can we 
expect to find his noblest and most enduring work in 
the dramatic experiments of his latest years. It is 
notable that, in his opinion, " the conditions of the 
dramatic art are much more complex than they were." 
For example, we have " the star system," which tends 
to allot what is, or was, technically styled " the fat," 
to one or two popular players. Now, a poet like 
Tennyson will inevitably distribute large quantities 



THE DRAMAS 169 

of what is most excellent to many characters, and the 
consequent difficulties may be appreciated by students 
of our fallen nature. The poet added that to be a 
first-rate historical playwright means much more work 
than formerly, seeing that " exact history " has taken 
the part of the chance chronicle. 

This is a misfortune. The dramas of the Attic 
stage, with one or two exceptions, are based on myth 
and legend, not on history, and even in the Persce, 
grounded on contemporary events, iEschylus intro- 
duced the ghost of Darius, not vouched for by "exact 
history." Let us conceive Shakespeare writing 
Macbeth in an age of " exact history." Hardly any 
of the play would be left. Fleance and Banquo must 
go. Duncan becomes a young man, and far from 
"gracious." Macbeth appears as the defender of the 
legitimist prince, Lulach, against Duncan, a usurper. 
Lady Macbeth is a pattern to her sex, and her lord is 
a clement and sagacious ruler. The witches are ruled 
out of the piece. Difficulties arise about the English aid 
to Malcolm. History, in fact, declines to be dramatic. 
Liberties must be taken. In his plays of the Mary 
Stuart cycle, Mr. Swinburne telescopes the affair of 
Darnley into that of Chastelard, which was much 
earlier. He makes Mary Beaton (in love with 
Chastelard) a kind of avenging fate, who will never 
leave the Queen till her head falls at Fotheringay ; 
though, in fact, after a flirtation with Randolph, Mary 
Beaton married Ogilvy of Boyne (really in love with 
Lady Bothwell), and not one of the four Maries was 
at Fotheringay. An artist ought to be allowed to 



170 



TENNYSON 



follow legend, of its essence dramatic, or to manipu- 
late history as he pleases. Our modern scrupulosity 
is pedantic. But Tennyson read a long list of books 
for his §)ueen Mary, though it does not appear that 
he made original researches in MSS. These labours 
occupied 1874 and 1875. Yet it would be foolish to 
criticise his ghieen Mary as if we were criticising 
" exact history." " The play's the thing." 

The poet thought that " Bloody Mary " "had been 
harshly judged by the verdict of popular tradition." 
So have most characters to whom popular dislike affixes 
the popular epithet — " Bloody Claverse," " Bloody 
Mackenzie," " Bloody Balfour." Mary had the cour- 
age of the Tudors. She. " edified all around her by 
her cheerfulness, her piety, and her resignation to the 
will of Providence," in her last days (Lingard). Cam- 
den calls her " a queen never praised enough for the 
purity of her morals, her charity to the poor " (she 
practised as a district visitor), " and her liberality to 
the nobles and the clergy." She was " pious, merci- 
ful, pure, and ever to be praised, if we overlook her 
erroneous opinions in religion," says Godwin. She 
had been grievously wronged from her youth upwards. 
In Elizabeth she had a sister and a rival, a constant 
intriguer against her, and a kinswoman far from ami- 
able. Despite " the kindness and attention of Philip " 
(Lingard) affairs of State demanded his absence from 
England. The disappointment as to her expected 
child was cruel. She knew that she had become un- 
popular, and she could not look for the success of her 
Church, to which she was sincerely attached. M. 



THE DRAMAS iyi 

Auguste Filon thought that ®)ueen Mary might secure 
dramatic rank for Tennyson, " if a great actress arose 
who conceived a passion for the part of Mary." But 
that was not to be expected. Mary was middle-aged, 
plain, and in aspect now terrible, now rueful. No 
great actress will throw herself with passion into such 
an ungrateful part. " Throughout all history," Ten- 
nyson said, "there was nothing more mournful than 
the final tragedy of this woman." Mournful it is, but 
not tragic. There is nothing grand at the close, as 
when Mary Stuart conquers death and evil fame, re- 
deeming herself by her courage and her calm, and 
extending over unborn generations that witchery 
which her enemies dreaded more than an army with 
banners. 

Moreover, popular tradition can never forgive the 
fires of Smithfield. It was Mary Tudor's misfortune 
that she had the power to execute, on a great scale, 
that faculty of persecution to the death for which her 
Presbyterian and other Protestant opponents pined in 
vain. Mr. Froude says of her, " For the first and 
last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant 
in England, the genuine conviction that, as the ortho- 
dox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the wor- 
shippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, 
as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies 
of God and man." That was precisely the spirit of 
Knox and other Presbyterian denouncers of death 
against " Idolaters " (Catholics). But the Scottish 
preachers were always thwarted : Mary and her ad- 
visers had their way, as, earlier, Latimer had preached 



I 7 2 



TENNYSON 



against sufferers at the stake. To the stake, which 
he feared so greatly, Cranmer had sent persons not of 
his own fleeting shade of theological opinion. These 
men had burned Anabaptists, but all that is lightly for- 
gotten by Protestant opinion. Under Mary (whoever 
may have been primarily responsible) Cranmer and 
Latimer were treated as they had treated others. 
Moreover, some two hundred poor men and women 
had dared the fiery death. The persecution was on 
a scale never forgiven or forgotten, since Mary began 
cerdonibus esse timenda. Mary was not essentially in- 
clement. Despite Renard, the agent of the Emperor, 
she spared that lord of fluff and feather, Courtenay, 
and she spared Elizabeth. Lady Jane she could not 
save, the girl who was a queen by grace of God and 
of her own royal nature. But Mary will never be 
pardoned by England. " Few men or women have 
lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing," 
says Mr. Froude, a great admirer of Tennyson's play. 
Yet, taking Mr. Froude's own view, Mary's abject 
and superannuated passion for Philip ; her ecstasies 
during her supposed pregnancy, " the forlorn hours 
when she would sit on the ground with her knees 
drawn to her face," with all her symptoms of hyster- 
ical derangement, leave little room, as we think of 
her, for other feelings than pity." Unfortunately, 
feelings of pity for a person so distraught, so sourly 
treated by fortune, do not suffice for tragedy. When 
we contemplate Antigone or CEdipus, it is not with 
a sentiment of pity struggling against abhorrence. 
For these reasons the play does not seem to have 



THE DRAMAS *73 

a good dramatic subject. The unity is given by Mary 
herself and her fortunes, and these are scarcely dra- 
matic. History prevents the introduction of Philip 
till the second scene of the third act. His entrance is 
manque ; he merely accompanies Cardinal Pole, who 
takes command of the scene, and Philip does not get 
in a word till after a long conversation between the 
Queen and the Cardinal. Previously Philip had only 
crossed the stage in a procession, yet when he does 
appear he is bereft of prominence. The interest as 
regards him is indicated, in Act I, scene v, by Mary's 
kissing his miniature. Her blighted love for him is 
one main motive of the tragedy, but his own part ap- 
pears too subordinate in the play as published. The 
interest is scattered among the vast crowd of charac- 
ters ; and Mr. R. H. Hutton remarked at the time 
that he " remains something of a cold, cruel, and 
sensual shadow." We are more interested in Wyatt, 
Cranmer, Gardiner, and others ; or at least their parts 
are more interesting. Yet in no case does the interest 
of any character, except of Mary and Elizabeth, re- 
main continuous throughout the play. Tennyson 
himself thought that "the real difficulty of the drama 
is to give sufficient relief to its intense sadness. . . • 
Nothing less than the holy calm of the meek and pen- 
itent Cranmer can be adequate artistic relief." But 
not much relief can be drawn from a man about to be 
burned alive, and history does not tempt us to keen 
sympathy with the recanting archbishop, at least if we 
agree with Macaulay rather than with Froude. 

I venture to think that historical tradition, as usual, 



174 



TENNYSON 



offered a better motive than exact history. Following 
tradition, we see in Mary a cloud of hateful gloom, 
from which England escapes into the glorious dawn 
of " the Gospel light," and of Elizabeth, who might 
be made a triumphantly sympathetic character. That 
is the natural and popular course which the drama 
might take. But Tennyson's history is almost critical 
and scientific. Points of difficult and debated evi- 
dence (as to Elizabeth's part in Wyatt's rebellion) are 
discussed. There is no contest of day and darkness, 
of Truth and Error. The characters are in that per- 
plexed condition about creeds which was their actual 
state after the political and social and religious chaos 
produced by Henry VIII. Gardiner is a Catholic, 
but not an Ultramontane ; Lord William Howard is 
a Catholic, but not a fanatic ; we find a truculent 
Anabaptist, or Socialist, and a citizen whose pride is 
his moderation. The native uncritical tendency of 
the drama is to throw up hats and halloo for Elizabeth 
and an open Bible. In place of this, Cecil delivers a 
well-considered analysis of the character of Eliza- 
beth : — 

' Eliz. God guide me lest I lose the way. 

[Exit Elizabeth. 
Cecil. Many points weather'd, many perilous ones, 
At last a harbour opens ; but therein 
Sunk rocks — they need fine steering — much it is 
To be nor mad, nor bigot — have a mind — 
Nor let Priests' talk, or dream of worlds to be, 
Miscolour things about her — sudden touches 
For him, or him — sunk rocks ; no passionate faith — 



THE DRAMAS 175 

But — if let be. — balance and compromise ; 
Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her — a Tudor 
School'd by the shadow of death — a Boleyn, too, 
Glancing across the Tudor — not so well." 



This is excellent as historical criticism, in the favour- 
able sense ; but the drama, by its nature, demands 
something not critical but triumphant and one-sided. 
The character of Elizabeth is one of the best in the 
play, as her soliloquy (Act III scene v) is one of the 
finest of the speeches. We see her courage, her 
coquetry, her dissimulation, her arrogance. But 
while this is the true Elizabeth, it is not the idealised 
Elizabeth whom English loyalty created, lived for, 
and died for. Mr. Froude wrote, u You have given 
us the greatest of all your works," an opinion which 
the world can never accept. " You have reclaimed 
one more section of English History from the wilder- 
ness, and given it a form in which it will be fixed for- 
ever. No one since Shakespeare has done that." 
But Mr. Froude had done it, and Tennyson's reading 
of " the section " is mainly that of Mr. Froude. Mr. 
Gladstone found that Cranmer and Gardiner " are 
still in a considerable degree mysteries to me." A 
mystery Cranmer must remain. Perhaps the 
" crowds " and " Voices " are not the least excellent 
of the characters, Tennyson's humour finding an 
opportunity in them, and in Joan and Tib. His 
idyllic charm speaks in the words of Lady Clarence 
to the fevered Oueen ; and there is dramatic genius 
in her reply : — 



I76 TENNYSON 

" Mary. What is the strange thing happiness ? Sit 
down here : 
Tell me thine happiest hour. 

Lady Clarence. I will, if that 
May make your Grace forget yourself a little. 
There runs a shallow brook across our field 
For twenty miles, where the black crow flies five, 
And doth so bound and babble all the way 
As if itself were happy. It was May-time, 
And I was walking with the man I loved. 
I loved him, but I thought I was not loved. 
And both were silent, letting the wild brook 
Speak for us — till he stoop'd and gather'd one 
From out a bed of thick forget-me-nots, 
Look'd hard and sweet at me, and gave it me. 
I took it, tho' I did not know I took it, 
And put it in my bosom, and all at once 
I felt his arms about me, and his lips 

Mary. O God ! I have been too slack, too slack ; 
There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards — 
Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt 
The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children. 
Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath, — 
We have so play'd the coward ; but by God's grace, 
We'll follow Philip's leading, and set up 
The Holy Office here — garner the wheat, 
And burn the tares with unquenchable fire ! " 

The conclusion, in the acting edition, printed in 
the Biography, appears to be an improvement on that 
in the text as originally published. Unhappy as the 
drama essentially is, the welcome which Mr. Brown- 
ing gave both to the published work and to the acted 



THE DRAMAS 1 77 

play — " a complete success " : " conception, execu- 
tion, the whole and the parts, I see nowhere the 
shadow of a fault " — offers "relief" in actual human 
nature. " He is the greatest-brained poet in Eng- 
land," Tennyson said, on a later occasion. " Violets 
fade, he has given me a crown of gold." 

Before writing Harold (1876) the poet " studied 
many recent plays," and reread iEschylus and Sopho- 
cles. For history he went to the Bayeux tapestry, 
the Roman de Rou y Lord Lytton, and Freeman. Stu- 
dents of a recent controversy will observe that, 
following Freeman, he retains the famous palisade, so 
grievously battered by the axe-strokes of Mr. Horace 
Round. Harold is a piece more compressed, and 
much more in accordance with the traditions of the 
drama, than Queen Mary. The topic is tragic in- 
deed : the sorrow being that of a great man, a great 
king, the bulwark of a people that fell with his fall. 
Moreover, as the topic is treated, the play is rich in 
the irony usually associated with the name of Sopho- 
cles. Victory comes before a fall. Harold, like 
Antigone, is torn between two duties — his oath and 
the claims of his country. His ruin comes from what 
Aristotle would call his d/iapria^ his fault in swearing 
the oath to William. The hero himself, recking 
little, after a superstitious moment, of the concealed 
relics over which he swore, deems his offense to lie 
in swearing a vow which he never meant to keep. 
The persuasions which urge him to this course are 
admirably presented : England, Edith, his brother's 
freedom, were at stake. Casuistry, or even law, 



I78 TENNYSON 

would have absolved him easily ; an oath taken under 
duresse is of no avail. But Harold's " honour rooted 
in dishonour stood," and he cannot so readily absolve 
himself. Bruce and the bishops who stood by Bruce 
had no such scruples : they perjured themselves often, 
on the most sacred relics, especially the bishops. 
But Harold rises above the mediaeval and magical 
conception of the oath, and goes to his doom con- 
scious of a stain on his honour, of which only a 
deeper stain, that of falseness to his country, could 
make him clean. This is a truly tragic stroke of 
destiny. The hero's character is admirably noble, 
patient, and simple. The Confessor also is as true in 
art as to history, and his vision of the fall and rise of 
England is a noble passage. In Aldwyth we have 
something of Vivien, with a grain of conscience, and 
the part of Edith Swan's-neck has a restrained and 
classic pathos in contrast with the melancholy of 
Wulfnoth. The piece, as the poet said, is a " tragedy 
of doom," of deepening and darkening omens, as in 
the Odyssey and Njal's Saga. The battle scene, with 
the choruses of the monks, makes a noble close. 

FitzGerald remained loyal, but it was to " a fairy 
Prince who came from other skies than these rainy 
ones," and " the wretched critics," as G. H. Lewes 
called them, seem to have been unfriendly. In fact 
(besides the innate wretchedness of all critics) they 
grudged the time and labour given to the drama, in 
an undramatic age. Harold had not what FitzGerald 
called " the old champagne flavour" of the vintage 
of 1842. 



THE DRAMAS 



I 79 



Becket was begun in 1876, printed in 1879, and 
published in 1884. Before that date, in 1880, Tenny- 
son produced one of the volumes of poetry which was 
more welcome than a play to most of his admirers. 
The intervening years passed in the Isle of Wight, at 
Aldworth, in town, and in summer tours, were of no 
marked biographical interest. The poet was close on 
three score and ten — he reached that limit in 1879. 
The days darkened around him, as darken they must: 
in the spring of 1879 he lost his favourite brother, 
himself a poet of original genius, Charles Tennyson 
Turner. In May of the same year he published The 
Lover s Tale, which has been treated here among his 
earliest works. His hours, and (to some extent) his 
meals, were regulated by Sir Andrew Clark. He 
planted trees, walked, read, loitered in his garden, and 
kept up his old friendships, while he made that of the 
great Gordon. Compliments passed between him 
and Victor Hugo, who had entertained Lionel Tenny- 
son in Paris, and wrote : " Je lis avec emotion vos 
vers superbes, c'est un reflet de gloire que vous m'en- 
voyez." Mr. Matthew Arnold's compliment was 
very like Mr. Arnold's humour: "Your father has 
been our most popular poet for over forty years, and I 
am of opinion that he fully deserves his reputation " : 
such was " Mat's sublime waggery." Tennyson 
heaped coals of fire on the other poet, bidding him, as 
he liked to be bidden, to write more poetrv, not 
u prose things." Tennyson lived much in the society 
of Browning and George Eliot, and made the ac- 
quaintance of Renan. In December, 1879, Mr. and 



l80 TENNYSON 

Mrs. Kendal produced The Falcon, which ran for 
sixty-seven nights ; it is " an exquisite little poem in 
action," as Fanny Kemble said. During a Conti- 
nental tour Tennyson visited Catullus's Sirmio : ct here 
the poet made his Frater Ave atque Vale" and he 
composed his beautiful salutation to the 

" Tenderest of Roman poets, nineteen hundred years ago." 

In 1880 Ballads and other Poems proved that, like 
Titian, the great poet was not to be defeated by the 
years. The First Quarrel was in his most popular 
English style. Rizpah deserved and received the 
splendid panegyric of Mr. Swinburne. The Revenge is 
probably the finest of the patriotic pieces, and keeps 
green the memory of an exploit the most marvelous 
in the annals of English seamen. The Village Wife 
is a pendant worthy of The Northern Farmer. The 
poem In the Children s Hospital caused some irritation 
at the moment, but there was only one opinion as to 
the Defence of Lucknow and the beautiful retelling of 
the Celtic Voyage of Maeldune. The fragment of 
Homeric translation was equally fortunate in choice 
of subject and in rendering. 

In the end of 1880 the poet finished The Cup, 
which had been worked on occasionly since he com- 
pleted The Falcon in 1880. The piece was read by 
the author to Sir Henry Irving and his company, and 
it was found that the manuscript copy needed few 
alterations to fit it for the stage. The scenery and 
the acting of the protagonists are not easily to be for- 
gotten. The play ran for a hundred and thirty nights. 



THE DRAMAS 151 

Sir Henry Irving had thought that Becket (then un- 
published) would prove too expensive, and could only 
be a succes d'estime. Tennyson had found out that 
" the worst of writing for the stage is, you must keep 
some actor always in your mind." To this necessity 
authors like Moliere and Shakespeare were, of course, 
resigned and familiar ; they knew exactly how to deal 
with all their means. But this part of the business 
of play-writing must always be a cross to the poet 
who is not at one with the world of the stage. 

In The Cup Miss Ellen Terry made the strongest 
impression, her part being noble and sympathetic, 
while Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the 
villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much com- 
plexity ; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend 
of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbar- 
ian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not " hit off." 
Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a 
Roman education, and the " blend " is rather too re- 
mote for successful representation. The traditional 
villain, from Iago downwards, is not apt to utter such 
poetry as this : — 

" O Thou, that dost inspire the germ with life, 
The child, a thread within the house of birth, 
And give him limbs, then air, and send him forth 
The glory of his father — Thou whose breath 
Is balmy wind to robe our hills with grass, 
And kindle all our vales with myrtle-blossom, 
And roll the golden oceans of our grain, 
And sway the long grape-bunches of our vines, 
And fill all hearts with fatness and the lust 
Of plenty — make me happy in my marriage ! " 



l82 TENNYSON 

The year 1881 brought the death of another of the 
old Cambridge friends, James Spedding, the biogra- 
pher of Bacon ; and Carlyle also died, a true friend, 
if rather intermittent in his appreciation of poetry. 
The real Carlyle did appreciate it, but the Carlyle of 
attitude was too much of the iron Covenanter to ex- 
press what he felt. The poem Despair irritated the 
earnest and serious readers of " know-nothing books." 
The poem expressed, dramatically, a mood like an- 
other, a human mood not so very uncommon. A 
man ruined in this world's happiness curses the faith 
of his youth, and the unfaith of his reading and re- 
flection, and tries to drown himself. This is one 
conclusion of the practical syllogism, and it is a free 
country. However, there were freethinkers who did 
not think that Tennyson's kind of thinking ought to 
be free. Other earnest persons objected to "First 
drink a health," in the re-fashioned song of Hands 
all Round: They might have remembered a royal 
health drunk in water an hour before the drinkers 
swept Mackay down the Pass of Killiecrankie. The 
poet did not specify the fluid in which the toast was 
to be carried, and the cup might be that which 
" cheers but not inebriates." " The common cup," 
as the remonstrants had to be informed, " has in all 
ages been the sacred symbol of unity." 

The Promise of May was produced in November, 
1882, and the poet was once mere so unfortunate as 
to vex the susceptibilities of advanced thinkers. The 
play is not a masterpiece, and yet neither the gallery 
gods nor the Marquis of Queensberry need have felt 



THE DRAMAS I 83 

their withers wrung. The hero, or villain, Edgar, is 
a perfectly impossible person, and represents no kind 
of political, social, or economical thinker. A man 
would give all other bliss and all his worldly wealth 
for this, to waste his whole strength in one kick upon 
this perfect prig. He employs the arguments of evo- 
lution and so forth to justify the seduction of a little 
girl of fifteen, and later, by way of making amends, 
proposes to commit incest by marrying her sister. 
There have been evolutionists, to be sure, who be- 
lieved in promiscuity, like Mr. Edgar, as preferable to 
monogamy. But this only proves that an evolution- 
ist may fail to understand evolution. There be also 
such folk as Stevenson calls " squirradicals " — squires 
who say that " the land is the people's." Probably 
no advocate of promiscuity, and no squirradical, was 
present at the performances of The Promise of May. 
But people of advanced minds had got it into their 
heads that their doctrines were to be attacked, so they 
went and made a hubbub in the sacred cause of free- 
dom of thought and speech. The truth is, that con- 
troversial topics, political topics, ought not to be 
brought into plays, much less into sermons. Tennyson 
meant Edgar for " nothing thorough, nothing sincere." 
He is that venomous thing, the prig-scoundrel : he 
does not suit the stage, and his place, if anywhere, is 
in the novel. Advocates of marriage with a deceased 
wife's sister might have applauded Edgar for wishing 
to marry the sister of a mistress assumed to be deceased, 
but no other party in the State wanted anything except 
the punching of Edgar's head by Farmer Dobson. 



184 TENNYSON 

In 1883 died Edward FitzGerald, the most kind, 
loyal, and, as he said, crotchety of old and dear Cam- 
bridge friends. He did not live to see the delightful 
poem which Tennyson had written for him. In al- 
most his latest letter he had remarked, superfluously, 
that when he called the task of translating The 
Agamejnnon " work for a poet," he " was not thinking 
of Mr. Browning." 

In the autumn of 1883 Tennyson was taken, with 
Mr. Gladstone, by Sir Donald Currie, for a cruise 
round the west coast of Scotland, to the Orkneys, 
and to Copenhagen. The people of Kirkwall con- 
ferred on the poet and the statesman the freedom of 
the burgh, and Mr. Gladstone, in an interesting speech, 
compared the relative chances of posthumous fame 
of the poet and the politician. Pericles is not less 
remembered than Sophocles, though Shakespeare is 
more in men's minds than Cecil. Much depends, as 
the statesmen are considered, on contemporary his- 
torians. It is Thucydides who immortalises Pericles. 
But it is improbable that the things which Mr. Glad- 
stone did, and attempted, will be forgotten more 
rapidly than the conduct and characters of, say, Bur- 
leigh or Lethington. 

In 1884, after this voyage, with its royal functions 
and celebrations at Copenhagen, a peerage was offered 
to the poet. He " did not want to alter his plain 
Mr.," and he must have known that, whether he ac- 
cepted or refused, the chorus of blame would be 
louder than that of applause. Scott had desired 
" such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath " ; the 



THE DRAMAS 185 

title went well with the old name, and pleased his love 
of old times. Tennyson had been blamed " by 
literary men " for thrice evading a baronetcy, and he 
did not think that a peerage would make smooth the 
lives of his descendants. But he concluded, " Why 
should I be selfish and not suffer an honour (as Glad- 
stone says) to be done to literature in my name ? " 
Politically, he thought that the Upper House, while 
it lasts, partly supplied the place of the American 
" referendum." He voted in July, 1884, for the ex- 
tension of the franchise, and in November stated his 
views to Mr. Gladstone in verse. In prose he wrote 
to Mr. Gladstone, " I have a strong conviction that 
the more simple the dealings of men with men, as 
well as of man with man, are — the better," a senti- 
ment which, perhaps, did not always prevail with his 
friend. The poet's reflections on the horror of Gor- 
don's death are not recorded. He introduced the 
idea of the Gordon Home for Boys, and later sup- 
ported it by a letter, " Have we forgotten Gordon ? " 
to the Daily Telegraph. They who cannot forget 
Gordon must always be grateful to Tennyson for 
providing this opportunity of honouring the greatest 
of an illustrious clan, and of helping, in their degree, 
a scheme which was dear to the heroic leader. The 
poet, very naturally, was most averse to personal ap- 
pearance in public matters. Mankind is so fashioned 
that the advice of a poet is always regarded as un- 
practical, and is even apt to injure the cause which he 
advocates. Happily there cannot be two opinions 
about the right way of honouring Gordon. Tenny- 



1 86 TENNYSON 

son's poem The Fleet, was also in harmony with the 
general sentiment. 

In the last month of 1884 Becket was published. 
The theme of Fair Rosamund had appealed to the 
poet in youth, and he had written part of a lyric 
which he judiciously left unpublished. It is given in 
his Biography. In 1877 he had visited Canterbury, 
and had traced the steps of Becket to his place of 
slaughter in the Cathedral. The poem' was printed in 
1879, but not published till seven years later. In 
1879 Sir Henry Irving had thought the play too costly 
to be produced with more than a succes d'estime ; but 
in 1 89 1 he put it on the stage, where it proved the 
most successful of modern poetic dramas. As pub- 
lished it is, obviously, far too long for public perform- 
ance. It is not easy to understand why dramatic 
poets always make their works so much too long. 
The drama seems, by its very nature, to have a limit 
almost as distinct as the limit of the sonnet. It is 
easy to calculate how long a play for the stage ought 
to be, and we might think that a poet would find the 
natural limit serviceable to his art, for it inculcates 
selection, conciseness, and concentration. But de- 
spite these advantages of the natural form of the 
drama, modern poets, at least, constantly overflow 
their banks. The author ruit profusus, and the man- 
ager has to reduce the piece to feasible proportions, 
such as it ought to have assumed from the first. 

Becket has been highly praised by Sir Henry Irving 

himself, for its " moments of passion and pathos, 

which, when they exist, atone to an audience 



THE DRAMAS 187 

for the endurance of long acts." But why should 
the audience have such long acts to endure ? The 
reader, one fears, is apt to use his privilege of skip- 
ping. The long speeches of Walter Map and the 
immense period of Margery tempt the student to ex- 
ercise his agility. A " chronicle play " has the privi- 
lege of wandering, but Becket wanders too far and too 
long. The political details of the quarrel between 
Church and State, with its domestic and international 
complexities, are apt to fatigue the attention. Inevi- 
table and insoluble as the situation was, neither pro- 
tagonist is entirely sympathetic, whether in the play 
or in history. The struggle in Becket between his 
love of the king and his duty to the Church (or what 
he takes to be his duty) is nobly presented, and is truly 
dramatic, while there is grotesque and terrible relief in 
the banquet of the Beggars. In the scene of the 
assassination the poet " never stoops his wing," and 
there are passages of tender pathos between Henry 
and Rosamund, while Becket's keen memories of his 
early days, just before his death, are moving: — 

" Becket. I once was out with Henry in the days 
When Henry loved me, and we came upon 
A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still 
I reach'd my hand and touch'd ; she did not stir ; 
The snow had frozen round her, and she sat 
Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs. 
Look ! how this love, this mother, runs thro* all 
The world God made — even the beast — the bird ! 

John of Salisbury. Ay, still a lover of the beast and 
bird? 



l88 TENNYSON 

But these arm'd men — will you not hide yourself? 

Perchance the fierce De Brocs from Saltwood Castle, 

To assail our Holy Mother lest she brood 

Too long o'er this hard egg, the world, and send 

Her whole heart's heat into it, till it break 

Into young angels. Pray you, hide yourself. 

Becket. There was a little fair-hair'd Norman maid 
Lived in my mother's house : if Rosamund is 
The world's rose, as her name imports her — she 
Was the world's lily. 

John of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her ? 

Becket. She died of leprosy." 

But the part of Rosamund, her innocent ignorance 
especially, is not very readily intelligible, not quite 
persuasive, and there is almost a touch of the burlesque 
in her unexpected appearance as a monk. To weave 
that old and famous story of love into the terribly 
complex political intrigue was a task almost too great. 
The character of Eleanor is perhaps more successfully 
drawn in the Prologue than in the scene where she 
offers the choice of the dagger or the bowl, and is in- 
terrupted, in a startlingly unexpected manner, by the 
Archbishop himself. The opportunities for scenic 
effects are magnificent throughout, and must have 
contributed greatly to the success on the stage. Still 
one cannot but regard the published Becket as rather 
the marble from which the statue may be hewn than 
as the statue itself. There are fine scenes, powerful 
and masterly drawing of character in Henry, Eleanor, 
and Becket, but there is a want of concentration, due, 
perhaps, to the long period of time covered by the 



THE DRAMAS 189 

action. So, at least, it seems to a reader who has ad- 
mitted his sense of incompetency in the dramatic 
region. The acuteness of the poet's power of histor- 
ical intuition was attested by Mr. J. R. Green and 
Mr. Bryce. u One cannot imagine," said Mr. Bryce, 
" a more vivid, a more perfectly faithful picture than 
it gives both of Henry and Thomas." Tennyson's 
portraits of these two u go beyond and perfect his- 
tory." The poet's sympathy ought, perhaps, to have 
been, if not with the false and ruffianly Henry, at 
least with Henry's side of the question. For Tenny- 
son had made Harold leave 

" to England 
My legacy of war against the Pope 

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age, 
Till the sea wash her level with her shores, 
Or till the Pope be Christ's." 



IX 

LAST YEARS 

The end of 1884 saw the publication of Tiresias 
and other Poems, dedicated to""" My good friend, 
Robert Browning," and opening with the beautiful 
verses to one who never was Mr. Browning's friend, 
Edward FitzGerald. The volume is rich in the best 
examples of Tennyson's later work. Tiresias, the 
monologue of the aged seer, blinded by excess of 
light when he beheld Athene unveiled, and under the 
curse of Cassandra, is worthy of the author who, in 
youth, wrote CEnone and Ulysses. Possibly the verses 
reflect Tennyson's own sense of public indifference 
to the voice of the poet and the seer. But they are 
of much earlier date than the year of publication : — 

" For when the crowd would roar 
For blood, for war, whose issue was their doom, 
To cast wise words among the multitude 
Was flinging fruit to lions ; nor, in hours 
Of civil outbreak, when I knew the twain 
Would each waste each, and bring on both the yoke 
Of stronger states, was mine the voice to curb 
The madness of our cities and their kings. 

Who ever turn'd upon his heel to hear 
My warning that the tyranny of one 
Was prelude to the tyranny of all ? 
190 



LAST YEARS I9I 

My counsel that the tyranny of all 
Led backward to the tyranny of one ? 

This power hath work'd no good to aught that lives." 

The conclusion was a favourite with the author, and 
his blank verse never reached a higher strain : — 

" But for me, 

I would that I were gather'd to my rest, 

And mingled with the famous kings of old, 

On whom about their ocean-islets flash 

The faces of the Gods — the wise man's word, 

Here trampled by the populace underfoot, 

There crown'd with worship — and these eyes will find 

The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl 

About the goal again, and hunters race 

The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings, 

In height and prowess more than human, strive 

Again for glory, while the golden lyre 

Is ever sounding in heroic ears 

Heroic hymns, and every way the vales 

Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume 

Of those who mix all odour to the Gods 

On one far height in one far-shining fire." 

Then follows the pathetic piece on FitzGerald's death, 
and the prayer, not unfulfilled — 

" That, when I from hence 
Shall fade with him into the unknown, 
My close of earth's experience 

May prove as peaceful as his own." 

The Ancient Sage, with its lyric interludes, is one 



I92 TENNYSON 

of Tennyson's meditations on the mystery of the 
world and of existence. Like the poet himself, the 
Sage finds a gleam of light and hope in his own sub- 
jective experiences of some unspeakable condition, 
already recorded in In Memoriam. The topic was 
one on which he seems to have spoken to his friends 
with freedom : — 

" And more, my son ! for more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 
Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world." 

The poet's habit of 

" revolving in myself 
The word that is symbol of myself " — 

that is, of dwelling on the sound of his own name, 
was familiar to the Arabs. M. Lefebure has drawn 
my attention to a passage in the works of a mediaeval 
Arab philosopher, Ibn Khaldoun : l " To arrive at the 
highest degree of inspiration of which he is capable, 

1 Notices et Extraits des MSS. delaBibliothtqiie Iwfie'riale, I. 
xix. pp. 643-645. 



LAST YEARS I 93 

the diviner should have recourse to the use of certain 
phrases marked by a peculiar cadence and parallelism. 
Thus he emancipates his mind from the influence of 
the senses, and is enabled to attain an imperfect con- 
tact with the spiritual world." Ibn Khaldoun regards 
the " contact " as extremely " imperfect." He de- 
scribes similar efforts made by concentrating the gaze 
on a mirror, a bowl of water, or the like. Tennyson 
was doubtless unaware that he had stumbled acciden- 
tally on a method of " ancient sages." Psychologists 
will explain his experience by the word " dissocia- 
tion." It is not everybody, however, who can thus 
dissociate himself. The temperament of genius has 
often been subject to such influence, as M. Lefebure 
has shown in the modern instances of George Sand 
and Alfred de Musset : we might add Shelley, Goethe, 
and even Scott. 

The poet's versatility was displayed in the appear- 
ance with these records of " weird seizures," of the 
Irish dialect piece To-morrow, the popular Spinster's 
Sweet- Arts, and the Lock sley Hall Sixty Tears After. 
The old fire of the versification is unabated, but the 
hero has relapsed on the gloom of the hero of Maud. 
He represents himself of course, not Tennyson, or 
only one of the moods of Tennyson, which were 
sometimes black enough. A very different mood 
chants the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, and speaks of 

" Green Sussex fading into blue 
With one gray glimpse of sea." 

The lines To Virgil were written at the request of the 



194 TENNYSON 

Mantuans, by the most Virgilian of all the successors 
of the 

"Wielder of the stateliest measure 

ever moulded by the lips of man." 

Never was Tennyson more Virgilian than in this un- 
matched panegyric, the sum and flower of criticism 
of that 

" Golden branch amid the shadows, 

kings and realms that pass to rise no more." 

Hardly less admirable is the tribute to Catullus, and 
the old poet is young again in the bird-song of Early 
Spring. The lines on Poets and their Bibliographies, 
with The Dead Prophet, express Tennyson's lifelong 
abhorrence of the critics and biographers, whose joy is 
in the futile and the unimportant, in personal gossip 
and the sweepings of the studio, the salvage of the 
waste-paper basket. The Prefatory Poem to my 
Brother s Sonnets is not only touching in itself, but 
proves that the poet can " turn to favour and to pret- 
tiness " such an affliction as the ruinous summer of 

i8 79 . 

The year 1880 brought deeper distress in the death 
of the poet's son Lionel, whose illness, begun in India, 
ended fatally in the Red Sea. The interest of the 
following years was mainly domestic. The poet's 
health, hitherto robust, was somewhat impaired in 
1888, but his vivid interest in affairs and in letters was 
unabated. He consoled himself with Virgil, Keats, 



LAST YEARS I 95 

Wordsworth, Gibbon, Euripides, and Mr. Leaf's 
speculations on the composite nature of the Iliad, in 
which Coleridge, perhaps alone among poets, believed. 
" You know," said Tennyson to Mr. Leaf, " I never 
liked that theory of yours about the many poets." It 
would be at least as easy to prove that there were 
many authors of Ivanhoe, or perhaps it would be a 
good deal more easy. However, he admitted that 
three lines which occur both in the Eighth and the 
Sixteenth Books of the Iliad are more appropriate in 
the later book. Similar examples might be found in 
his own poems. He still wrote, in the intervals of a 
malady which brought him " as near death as a man 
could be without dying." He was an example of the 
great physical strength which, on the whole, seems 
usually to accompany great mental power. The 
strength may be dissipated by passion, or by undue 
labour, as in cases easily recalled to memory, but 
neither cause had impaired the vigour of Tennyson. 
Like Goethe, he lived out all his life ; and his eightieth 
birthday was cheered both by public and private ex- 
pressions of reverence and affection. 

Of Tennyson's last three years on earth we may 
think, in his own words, that his 

" Life's latest eve endured 
Nor settled into hueless gray." 

Nature was as dear to him and as inspiring as of old ; 
men and affairs and letters were not slurred by his in- 
tact and energetic mind. His De?neter and other 
Poems, with the dedication of Lord Dufferin, appeared 



I96 TENNYSON 

in the December of the year. The dedication was 
the lament for the dead son and the salutation to the 
Viceroy of India, a piece of resigned and manly re- 
gret. The Demeter and Persephone is a modern and 
tender study of the theme of the most beautiful 
Homeric Hymn. The ancient poet had no such 
thought of the restored Persephone as that which im- 
pels Tennyson to describe her 

" Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies 
All night across the darkness, and at dawn 
Falls on the threshold of her native land." 

The spring, the restored Persephone, comes more vig- 
orous and joyous to the shores of the iEgean than to 
ours. All Tennyson's own is Demeter's awe of 
those " imperial disimpassioned eyes " of her daughter, 
come from the bed and the throne of Hades, the Lord 
of many guests. The hymn, happy in its ending, has 
no thought of the gray heads of the Fates, and their 
answer to the goddess concerning " fate beyond the 
Fates," and the breaking of the bonds of Hades. The 
ballad of Owd Ro'd is one of the most spirited of the 
essays in dialect to which Tennyson had of late years 
inclined. Fastness merely expresses, in terms of 
poetry, Tennyson's conviction that, without immor- 
tality, life is a series of worthless contrasts. An op- 
posite opinion may be entertained, but a man has a 
right to express his own, which, coming from so great 
a mind, is not undeserving of attention ; or, at least, 
is hardly deserving of reproof. The poet's idea is 
also stated thus in The Ring, in terms which perhaps 



LAST YEARS 



l 97 



do not fall below the poetical ; or, at least, do not 
drop into "the utterly unpoetical " : — 



" The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was Man, 
But cannot wholly free itself from Man, 
Are calling to each other thro' a dawn 
Stranger than earth has ever seen ; the veil 
Is rending, and the Voices of the day 
Are heard across the Voices of the dark. 
No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, 
But thro' the Will of One who knows and rules — 
And utter knowledge is but utter love — 
iEonian Evolution, swift or slow, 
Thro' all the Spheres — an ever opening height, 
An ever lessening earth." 

The Ring is, in fact, a ghost story based on a legend 
told by Mr. Lowell about a house near where he had 
once lived ; one of these houses vexed by 

" A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls, 
A noise of falling weights that never fell, 
Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand, 
Door-handles turn'd when none was at the door, 
And bolted doors that open'd of themselves." 

These phenomena were doubtless caused by rats 
and water-pipes, but they do not destroy the pity and 
the passion of the tale. The lines to Mary Boyle 
are all of the normal world, and worthy of a poet's 



I98 TENNYSON 

youth and of the spring. Merlin and the Gleam is 
the spiritual allegory of the poet's own career : — 

" Arthur had vanish'd 
I knew not whither, 
The king who loved me, 
And cannot die." 



So at last 



" All but in Heaven 
Hovers The Gleam," 



whither the wayfarer was soon to follow. There is a 
marvelous hope and pathos in the melancholy of 
these all but the latest songs, reminiscent of youth 
and love, and even of the dim haunting memories and 
dreams of infancy. No other English poet has thus 
rounded all his life with music. Tennyson was in 
his eighty-first year, when there " came in a moment " 
the crown of his work, the immortal lyric, Crossing the 
Bar. It is hardly less majestic and musical in the 
perfect Greek rendering by his brother-in-law, Mr. 
Lushington. For once at least a poem has been 
" poured from the golden to the silver cup " without 
the spilling of a drop. The new book's appearance 
was coincident with the death of Mr. Browning, " so 
loving and appreciative," as Lady Tennyson wrote ; a 
friend, not a rival, however the partisans of either 
poet might strive to stir emulation between two men 
of such lofty and such various genius. 



1890 

In the year 1889 the poet's health had permitted 
him to take long walks on the seashore and along 
the cliffs, one of which, by reason of its whiteness, he 
had named " Taliessin," " the splendid brow." His 
mind ran on a poem founded on an Egyptian legend 
(of which the source is not mentioned), telling how 
"despair and death came upon him who was mad 
enough to try to probe the secret of the universe." 
He also thought of a drama on Tristram, who, in the 
Idylls, is treated with brevity, and not with the sym- 
pathy of the old writer who cries, " God bless Tris- 
tram the knight : he fought for England ! " But early 
in 1890 Tennyson suffered from a severe attack of 
influenza. In May Mr. Watts painted his portrait, 
and 

"Divinely through all hindrance found the man." 

Tennyson was a great admirer of Miss Austen's 
novels: "The realism and life-likeness of Miss 
Austen's Dramatis Persons come nearest to those of 
Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is a sun to which 
Jane Austen, though a bright and true little world, is 
but an asteroid." He was therefore pleased to find 
apple blossoms coexisting with ripe strawberries on 

199 



200 TENNYSON 

June 28, as Miss Austen has been blamed, by minute 
philosophers, for introducing this combination in the 
garden party in Emma. The poet, like most of the 
good and great, read novels eagerly, and excited him- 
self over the confirmation of an adult male in a story 
by Miss Yonge. Of Scott, " the most chivalrous 
literary figure of the century, and the author with the 
widest range since Shakespeare," he preferred Old 
Mortality, and it is a good choice. He hated " mor- 
bid and introspective tales, with their oceans of sham 
philosophy." At this time, with catholic taste, he 
read Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Meredith, Miss Braddon 
and Mr. Henry James, Ouida and Mr. Thomas 
Hardy; Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Anstey ; Mrs. 
Oliphant and Miss Edna Lyall. Not everybody can 
peruse all of these very diverse authors with pleasure. 
He began his poem on the Roman gladiatorial com- 
bats; indeed his years, fourscore and one, left his in- 
tellectual eagerness as unimpaired as that of Goethe. 
" A crooked share," he said to the Princess Louise, 
" may make a straight furrow." " One afternoon he 

had a long waltz with M in the ballroom." 

Speaking of 

" All the charm of all the Muses 

Often flowering in a lonely word " 

in Virgil, he adduced, rather strangely, the cunctantem 
ramum, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth 
i^neid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has 
just told /Eneas that, if he be destined to pluck the 
branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, " it will 



189O 201 

come off of its own accord," like the sacred ti 
branches of the Fijians, which bend down to be 
plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined 
^neas tries to pluck the bough of gold, it yields re- 
luctantly (cunctantem), contrary to what the Sibyl has 
foretold. Mr. Conington, therefore, thought the 
phrase a slip on the part of Virgil. " People accused 
Virgil of plagiarising," he said, "but if a man made 
it his own there was no harm in that (look at the 
great poets, Shakespeare included)." Tennyson, like 
Virgil, made much that was ancient his own; his 
verses are often, and purposefully, a mosaic of clas- 
sical reminiscences. But he was vexed by the hunters 
after remote and unconscious resemblances, and far- 
fetched analogies between his lines and those of 
others. He complained that, if he said that the sun 
went down, a parallel was at once cited from Homer, 
or anybody else, and he used a very powerful phrase 
to condemn critics who detected such repetitions. 
"The moanings of the homeless sea," — "moanings " 
from Horace, " homeless " from Shelley. " As if no 
one else had ever heard the sea moan except Horace ! " 
Tennyson's mixture of memory and forgetfulness was 
not so strange as that of Scott, and when he adapted 
from the Greek, Latin, or Italian, it was of set pur- 
pose, just as it was with Virgil. The beautiful lines 
comparing a girl's eyes to bottom agates that seem to 

" wave and float 
In crystal currents of clear running seas," 

he invented while bathing in Wales. It was his habit 



202 TENNYSON 

to note down in verse such similes from nature, and 
to use them when he found occasion. But the higher 
criticism, analysing the simile, detected elements from 
Shakespeare and from Beaumont and Fletcher. 

In June, 189 1, the poet went on a tour in Devon- 
shire, and began his Akbar, and probably wrote 'June 
Bracken and Heather ; or perhaps it was composed 
when " we often sat on the top of Blackdown to 
watch the sunset." He wrote to Mr. Kipling — 

" The oldest to the youngest singer 
That England bore " 

(to alter Mr. Swinburne's lines to Landor), praising 
his Flag of England. Mr. Kipling replied as " the 
private to the general." 

Early in 1892 The Foresters was successfully pro- 
duced at New York by Miss Ada Rehan, the music 
by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and the scenery from wood- 
land designs by Whymper. Robin Hood (as we learn 
from Mark Twain) is a favourite hero with the youth 
of America. Mr. Tom Sawyer himself took, in 
Mark Twain's tale, the part of the bold outlaw. 

The Death of CEnone was published in 1892, with 
the dedication to the Master of Balliol — 

" Read a Grecian tale retold 
Which, cast in later Grecian mould, 

Ouintus Calaber 
Somewhat lazily handled of old." 

Ouintus Calaber, more usually called Quintus Smyr- 
naeus, is a writer of perhaps the fourth century of our 



1890 203 

era. About him nothing, or next to nothing, is 
known. He told, in so late an age, the conclusion 
of the Tale of Troy, and (in the writer's opinion) 
has been unduly neglected and disdained. His man- 
ner, I venture to think, is more Homeric than that of 
the more famous and doubtless greater Alexandrian 
poet of the Argonautic cycle, Apollonius Rhodius, 
his senior by five centuries. His materials were prob- 
ably the ancient and lost poems of the Epic Cycle, 
and the story of the death of GEnone mav be from 
the Little Iliad of Lesches. Possibly parts of his 
work may be textually derived from the Cyclics, but 
the topic is very obscure. In Ouintus, Paris, after 
encountering evil omens on his way, makes a long 
speech, imploring the pardon of the deserted GEnone. 
She replies, not with the Tennysonian brevity ; she 
sends him back to the helpless arms of her rival, 
Helen. Paris dies on the hills ; never did Helen see 
him returning. The wood-nymphs bewail Paris, and 
a herdsman brings the bitter news to Helen, who 
chants her lament. But remorse falls on CEnone. 
She does not go 

" slowly down 
By the long torrent's ever-deepened roar," 

but rushes " swift as the wind to seek and spring upon 
the pyre of her lord." Fate and Aphrodite drive her 
headlong, and in heaven Selene, remembering Endy- 
mion, bewails the lot of her sister in sorrow. 
CEnone reaches the funeral flame, and without a word 
or a cry leaps into her husband's arms, the wild 



204 TENNYSON 

Nymphs wondering. The lovers are mingled in one 
heap of ashes, and these are bestowed in one vessel 
of gold and buried in a howe. This is the story 
which the poet rehandled in his old age, completing 
the work of his happy youth when he walked with 
Hallam in the Pyrencan hills, that were to him as 
Ida. The romance of GEnone and her death con- 
done, as even Homer was apt to condone, the sins of 
beautiful Paris, whom the nymphs lament, despite the 
evil that he has wrought. The silence of the veiled 
CEnone, as she springs into her lover's last embrace, 
is perhaps more affecting and more natural than 
Tennyson's 

" She lifted up a voice 
Of shrill command, * Who burns upon the pyre?" 

The St. Tclemachus has the old splendour and 
vigour of verse, and, though written so late in life, is 
worthy of the poet's prime : — 

" Eve after eve that haggard anchorite 
Would haunt the desolated fane, and there 
Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low 
' Vicisti Galil.re'; louder again, 
Spurning a shatter'd fragment of the God, 
' Vicisti Galil.cc ! ' but — when now 
Bathed in that lurid crimson — ask'd ' Is earth 
On fire to the West ? or is the Demon-god 
Wroth at his fall ? ' and heard an answer ' Wake 
Thou decdlcss dreamer, lazying out a life 
Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.' 



1890 20 5 

And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost 

The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings 

Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West, 

And at his ear he heard a whisper ' Rome ' 

And in his heart he cried * The call of God ! ' 

And call'd arose, and, slowly plunging down 

Thro' that disastrous glory, set his face 

Bv waste and field and town of alien tongue, 

Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere 

Of westward-wheeling stars ; and every dawn 

Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome. 

Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch'd his goal, 
The Christian city." 

Akbars Dream may be taken, more or less, to repre- 
sent the poet's own theology of a race seeking after 
God, if perchance they may find Him, and the clos- 
ing Hymn was a favourite with Tennyson. He said, 
" It is a magnificent metre " : — 



" Hymn. 



Once again thou flamest heavenward, once again we see 

thee rise. 
Every morning is thy birthday gladdening human hearts and 
eyes. 
Every morning here we greet it, bowing lowly down 
before thee, 
Thee the Godlike, thee the changeless in thine ever-chang- 
ing skies. 



206 TENNYSON 

II. 

Shadow-maker, shadow-slayer, arrowing light from clime to 

clime, 
Hear thy myriad laureates hail thee monarch in their wood- 
land rhyme. 
Warble bird, and open flower, and, men, below the 
dome of azure 
Kneel adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures 
Time ! " 

In this final volume the poet cast his handful of 
incense on the altar of Scott, versifying the tale of // 
Bizan-o, which the dying Sir Walter records in his 
Journal in Italy. The Churchwarden and the Curate 
is not inferior to the earlier peasant poems in its ex- 
pression of shrewdness, humour, and superstition. A 
verse of Poets and Critics may be taken as the poet's 
last word on the old futile quarrel : — 

" This thing, that thing is the rage, 
Helter-skelter runs the age ; 
Minds on this round earth of ours 
Vary like the leaves and flowers, 

Fashion'd after certain laws ; 
Sing thou low or loud or sweet, 
All at all points thou canst not meet, 

Some will pass and some will pause. 

What is true at last will tell : 
Few at first will place thee well ; 
Some too low would have thee shine, 
Some too high — no fault of thine — 
Hold thine own, and work thy will ! 



1890 207 

Year will graze the heel of year, 

But seldom comes the poet here, 

And the Critic's rarer still." 

Still the lines hold good — 

" Some too low would have thee shine, 
Some too high — no fault of thine." 

The end was now at hand. A sense of weakness 
was felt by the poet on September 3, 1892 : on the 
29th his family sent for Sir Andrew Clark ; but the 
patient gradually faded out of life, and expired on 
Thursday, October 6, at 1:35 A. M. To the very 
last he had Shakespeare by him, and his windows 
were open to the sun, on the last night they were 
flooded by the moonlight. The description of the 
final scenes must be read in the Biography by the 
poet's son. "His patience and quiet strength had 
power upon those who were nearest and dearest to 
him ; we felt thankful for the love and the utter 
peace of it all." " The life after death," Tennyson 
had said just before his fatal illness, "is the cardinal 
point of Christianity. I believe that God reveals 
Himself in every individual soul ; and mv idea of 
Heaven is the perpetual ministry of one soul to an- 
other." He had lived the life of heaven upon earth, 
being in all his work a minister of things honourable, 
lovely, consoling, and ennobling to the souls of others, 
with a ministry which cannot die. His body sleeps 
next to that of his friend and fellow poet, Robert 
Browning, in front of Chaucer's monument in the 
Abbey. 



LAST CHAPTER 

" O, that Press will get hold of me now," Ten- 
nyson said when he knew that his last hour was at 
hand. He had a horror of personal tattle, as even his 
early poems declare — 

" For now the Poet cannot die, 
Nor leave his music as of old, 
But round him ere he scarce be cold 
Begins the scandal and the cry." 

But no " carrion-vulture " has waited 

" To tear his heart before the crowd." 

About Tennyson, doubtless, there is much anecdo- 
tage : most of the anecdotes turn on his shyness, his 
really exaggerated hatred of personal notoriety, and 
{he odd and brusque things which he would say when 
alarmed by effusive strangers. It has not seemed 
worth while to repeat more than one or two of these 
legends, nor have I sought outside the Biography by 
his son for more than the biographer chose to tell. 
The readers who are least interested in poetry are 
most interested in tattle about the poet. It is the 
privilege of genius to retain the freshness and sim- 
plicity, with some of the foibles, of the child. When 
Tennyson read his poems aloud he was apt to be 
moved by them, and to express frankly his approba- 

20S 



LAST CHAPTER 2C>9 

tion where he thought it deserved. Only very rudi- 
mentary psychologists recognised conceit in this free- 
dom ; and only the same set of persons mistook shy- 
ness for arrogance. Effusiveness of praise or curiosity 
in a stranger is apt to produce bluntness of reply in a 

Briton. "Don't talk d d nonsense, sir," said the 

Duke of Wellington to the gushing person who 
piloted him, in his old age, across Piccadilly. Of 
Tennyson Mr. Palgrave says, " I have known him 
silenced, almost frozen, before the eager unintentional 
eyes of a girl of fifteen. And under the stress of this 
nervous impulse compelled to contradict his inner 
self (especially when under the terror of leonisation 
. ) ; he was doubtless at times betrayed into an 
abrupt phrase, a cold unsympathetic exterior ; a mo- 
ment's c defect of the rose.' " Had he not been 
sensitive in all things, he would have been less of a 
poet. The chief criticism directed against his mode 
of life is that he was sensitive and reserved, but he 
could and did make himself pleasant in the society of 
les pauvres d'esprit. Curiosity alarmed him, and drove 
him into his shell : strangers who met him in that 
mood carried away false impressions, which developed 
into myths. As the Master of Balliol has recorded, 
despite his shyness " he was extremely hospitable, 
often inviting not only his friends, but the friends of 
his friends, and giving them a hearty welcome. For 
underneath a sensitive exterior he was thoroughly 
genial if he was understood." In these points he was 
unlike his great contemporary, Browning ; for in- 
stance, Tennyson never (I think) was the Master's 



210 TENNYSON 

guest at Balliol, mingling, like Browning, with the 
undergraduates, to whom the Master's hospitality was 
freely extended. Yet, where he was familiar, Tenny- 
son was a gay companion, not shunning jest or even 
paradox. " As Dr. Johnson says, every man may be 
judged of by his laughter " : but no Boswell has 
chronicled the laughters of Tennyson. " He never, 
or hardly ever, made puns or witticisms " (though one 
pun, at least, endures in tradition), " but always lived 
in an attitude of humour." Mr. Jowett writes (and 
no description of the poet is better than this) : 

If I were to describe his outward appearance, I should say 
that he was certainly unlike any one else whom I ever saw. 
A glance at some of Watts' portraits of him will give, better 
than any description which can be expressed in words, a 
conception of his noble mien and look. He was a magnifi- 
cent man, who stood before you in his native refinement and 
strength. The unconventionality of his manners was in 
keeping with the originality of his figure. He would some- 
times say nothing, or a word or two only, to the stranger who 
approached him, out of shyness. He would sometimes come 
into the drawing-room reading a book. At other times, 
especially to ladies, he was singularly gracious and be- 
nevolent. He would talk about the accidents of his own life 
with an extraordinary freedom, as at the moment they 
appeared to present themselves to his mind, the days of his 
boyhood that were passed at Somersby, and the old school 
of manners which he came across in his own neighbour- 
hood : the days of the "apostles" at Cambridge: the years 
which he spent in London ; the evenings enjoyed at the 
Cock Tavern, and elsewhere, when he saw another side 
of life, not without a kindly and humorous sense of the 



LAST CHAPTER 211 

ridiculous in his fellow-creatures. His repertory of stories 
was perfectly inexhaustible ; they were often about slight 
matters that would scarcely bear repetition, but were told 
with such lifelike reality, that they convulsed his hearers 
with laughter. Like most story-tellers, he often repeated 
his favourites ; but, like children his audience liked hear- 
ing them again and again, and he enjoyed telling them. It 
might be said of him that he told more stories than any one, 
but was by no means the regular story-teller. In the com- 
monest conversation he showed himself a man of genius. 

To this description may be added another by Mr. F. 
T. Palgrave. 

Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line 
of work, whose conversation (to take the old figure) either 
" smelt too strongly of the lamp," or lay quite apart from 
their art or craft. What, through all these years, struck me 
about Tennyson, was that whilst he never deviated into 
poetical language as such, whether in rhetoric or highly 
coloured phrase, yet throughout the substance of his talk 
the same mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of 
nature, the same fineness and gentleness in his view of 
character, the same forbearance and toleration, the aurea 
mediocritas despised by fools and fanatics, which are stamped 
on his poetry, were constantly perceptible : whilst in the easy 
and as it were unsought choiceness, the conscientious and 
truth-loving precision of his words, the same personal iden- 
tity revealed itself. What a strange charm lay here ; how 
deeply illuminating the whole character, as in prolonged 
intercourse it gradually revealed itself! Artist and man, 
Tennyson was invariably true to himself, or rather, in 
Wordsworth's phrase, he "moved altogether"; his nature 
and his poetry being harmonious aspects of the same soul ; 



212 TENNYSON 

as botanists tell us that flower and fruit are but transforma- 
tions of root and stem and leafage. We read how, in medi- 
aeval days, conduits were made to flow with claret. But 
this was on great occasions only. Tennyson's fountain 
always ran wine. 

Once more : In Mme. Recamier's salon, I have read, at 
the time when conversation was yet a fine art in Paris, 
guests famous for esprit would sit in the twilight round the 
stove, whilst each in turn let fly some sparkling anecdote or 
bon-mot, which rose and shone and died out into silence, 
till the next of the elect pyrotechnists was ready. Good 
things of this kind, as I have said, were plentiful in 
Tennyson's repertory. But what, to pass from the materials 
to the method of his conversation, eminently marked it was 
the continuity of the electric current. He spoke, and was 
silent, and spoke again : but the circuit was unbroken ; there 
was no effort in taking up the thread, no sense of disjunction. 
Often I thought, had he never written a line of the poems 
so dear to us, his conversation alone would have made him 
the most interesting companion known to me. From this 
great and gracious student of humanity, what less, indeed, 
could be expected ? And if, as a converser, I were to com- 
pare him with Socrates, as figured for us in the dialogues of 
his great disciple, I think that I should have the assent of 
that eminently valued friend of Tennyson's, whose long 
labour of love has conferred English citizenship upon Plato. 

We have called him shy and sensitive in daily in- 
tercourse with strangers, and as to criticism, he freely 
confessed that a midge of dispraise could sting, while 
applause gave him little pleasure. Yet no poet altered 
his verses so much in obedience to censure unjustly 
or irritatingly stated, yet in essence just. He readily 



LAST CHAPTER 213 

rejected some of his " Juvenilia " on Mr. Palgrave's 
suggestion. The same friend tells how well he took a 
rather fierce attack on an unpublished piece, when 
Mr. Palgrave " owned that he could not find one good 
line in it." Very few poets, or even versifiers (fiercer 
they than poets are), would have continued to show 
their virgin numbers to a friend so candid, as Tenny- 
son did. Perhaps most of the genus irritabile will 
grant that spoken criticism, if unfavourable, somehow 
annoys and stirs opposition in an author; probably 
because it confirms his own suspicions about his 
work. Such criticism is almost invariably just. But 
Campbell, when Rogers offered a correction, " bounced 
out of the room, with a c Hang it ! I should like to 
see the man who would dare to correct me.' ' 

Mr. Jowett justly recognised in the life of Tenny- 
son two circumstances which made him other than, 
but for these, he would have been. He had intended 
to do with the Arthurian subject what he never did, 
" in some way or other to have represented in it the 
great religions of the world. . . . It is a proof of 
Tennyson's genius that he should have thus early 
grasped the great historical aspect of religion." His 
intention was foiled, his early dream was broken, by 
the death of Arthur Hallam, and by the coldness and 
contempt with which, at the same period, his early 
poems were received. 

Mr. Jowett (who had a firm belief in the "great 
work ") regretted the change of plan as to the Arthur- 
ian topic, regretted it the more from his own interest 
in the History of Religion. But we need not share 



214 TENNYSON 

the regrets. The early plan for the Arthur (which 
Mr. Jowett never saw) has been published, and cer- 
tainly the scheme could not have been executed on 
these lines. l Moreover, as the Master observed, the 
work would have been premature in Tennyson's 
youth, and, indeed, it would still be premature. The 
comparative science of religious evolution is even now 
very tentative, and does not yield materials of suffi- 
cient stability for an epic, even if such an epic could 
be forced into the mould of the Arthur legends, a feat 
perhaps impossible, and certainly undesirable. A 
truly fantastic allegory must have been the result, and 
it is fortunate that the poet abandoned the idea in 
favour of more human themes. Moreover, he rec- 
ognised very early that his was not a muse de longue 
haleine ; that he must be " short." We may there- 
fore feel certain that his early sorrow and discourage- 
ment were salutary to him as a poet, and as a man. 
He became more sympathetic, more tender, and was 
obliged to put forth that stoical self-control, and 
strenuous courage and endurance, through which alone 
his poetic career was rendered possible. " He had 
the susceptibility of a child or a woman," says his 
friend ; " he had also " (it was a strange combination) 
" the strength of a giant or of a god." Without 
these qualities he must have broken down between 
1833 and 1842 into a hypochondriac, or a morose, if 
majestic, failure. Poor, obscure, and unhappy, he 
overcame the world, and passed from darkness into 
light. The " poetic temperament " in another not 

1 Sec the Life, 1899, p. 521. 



LAST CHAPTER 21 5 

gifted with his endurance and persistent strength 
would have achieved ruin. 

Most of us remember Taine's parallel between 
Tennyson and Alfred de Musset. The French critic 
has no high approval of Tennyson's " respectability " 
and long peaceful life, as compared with the wrecked 
life and genius of Musset, F enfant perdu of love, 
wine, and song. This is a theory like another, and 
is perhaps attractive to the young. The poet must 
have strong passions, or how can he sing of them : 
he must be tossed and whirled in the stress of things, 
like Shelley's autumn leaves, 

" Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." 

Looking at Burns, Byron, Musset, or even at Shelley's 
earlier years, youth sees in them the true poets, 
"sacred things," but also "light," as Plato says, in- 
spired to break their wings against the nature of ex- 
istence, and the jiammantia mcenia mundi. But this is 
almost a boyish idea, this idea that the true poet is the 
slave of the passions, and that the poet who domi- 
nates them has none, and is but a staid domestic ani- 
mal, an ass browsing the common, as somebody has 
written about Wordsworth. Certainly Tennyson's 
was no "passionless perfection." He, like others, 
was tempted to beat with ineffectual wings against the 
inscrutable nature of life. He, too, had his dark 
hour, and was as subject to temptation as they who 
yielded to the stress and died, or became unhappy 
waifs, " young men with a splendid past." He must 
have known, no less than Musset, the attractions of 



2l6 TENNYSON 

many a paradis artificiel, with its bright visions, its 
houris, its offers of oblivion of pain. " He had the 
look of one who had suffered greatly," Mr. Palgrave 
writes in his record of their first meeting in 1842. 
But he, like Goethe, Scott, and Victor Hugo, had 
strength as well as passion and emotion ; he came 
unscorched through the fire that has burned away the 
wings of so many other great poets. This was no 
less fortunate for the world than for himself. Of his 
prolonged dark hour we know little in detail, but we 
have seen that from the first he resisted the Tempter ; 
Ulysses is his Retro Sathanas ! 

About " the mechanism of genius " in Tennyson 
Mr. Palgrave has told us a little ; more appears in- 
cidentally in his biography. " It was his way that 
when we had entered on some scene of special beauty 
or grandeur, after enjoying it together, he should al- 
ways withdraw wholly from sight, and study the view 
as it were, in a little artificial solitude." 

Tennyson's poems, Mr. Palgrave says, often arose 
in a kind of point de repere (like those forms and land- 
scapes which seem to spring from a floating point of 
light, beheld with closed eyes just before we sleep). 
" More than once he said that his poems sprang often 
from a c nucleus,' some one word, may be, or brief 
melodious phrase, which had floated through the 
brain, as it were, unbidden. And perhaps at once 
while walking they were presently wrought into a 
little song. But if he did not write it down at once 
the lyric fled from him irrecoverably." He believed 
himself thus to have lost poems as good as his best. 



LAST CHAPTER 21 7 

It seems probable that this is a common genesis of 
verses, good or bad, among all who write. Like 
Dickens, and like most men of genius probably, he 
saw all the scenes of his poems " in his mind's eye." 
Many authors do this, without the power of making 
their readers share the vision ; but probably few can 
impart the vision who do not themselves " visualise " 
with distinctness. We have seen, in the cases of The 
Holy Grail and other pieces, that Tennyson, after 
long meditating a subject, often wrote very rapidly, 
and with little need of correction. He was born 
with " style " ; it was a gift of his genius rather than 
the result of conscious elaboration. Yet he did use 
" the file," of which much is now written, especially 
for the purpose of polishing away the sibilants, so 
common in our language. In the nine years of si- 
lence which followed the little book of 1833 his 
poems matured, and henceforth it is probable that he 
altered his verses little, if we except the modifications 
in The Princess. Many slight verbal touches were 
made, or old readings were restored, but important 
changes, in the way of omission or addition, became 
rare. 

Of nature Tennyson was scrupulously observant 
till his very latest days, eagerly noting, not only 
" effects," as a painter does, but their causes, botanical 
or geological. Had man been scientific from the 
beginning he would probably have evolved no poetry 
at all ; material things would not have been endowed 
by him with life and passion ; he would have told 
himself no stories of the origins of stars and flowers, 



2l8 TENNYSON 

clouds and fire, winds and rainbows. Modern poets 
have resented, like Keats and Wordsworth, the de- 
struction of the old prehistoric dreams by the geologist 
and by other scientific characters. But it was part 
of Tennyson's poetic originality to see the beautiful 
things of nature at once with the vision of early 
poetic men, and of moderns accustomed to the 
microscope, telescope, spectrum analysis, and so forth. 
Thus Tennyson received a double delight from the 
sensible universe, and it is a double delight that he 
communicates to his readers. His intellect was thus 
always active, even in apparent repose. His eyes 
rested not from observing, or his mind from record- 
ing and comparing the beautiful familiar phenomena 
of earth and sky. In the matter of the study of 
books we have seen how deeply versed he was in cer- 
tain of the Greek, Roman, and Italian classics. Mr. 
Jowett writes : " He was what might be called a good 
scholar in the university or public-school sense of 
the term, . . . yet I seem to remember that he 
had his favourite classics, such as Homer, and Pindar, 
and Theocritus. ... He was also a lover of 
Greek fragments. But I am not sure whether, in 
later life, he ever sat down to read consecutively the 
greatest works of iEschylus and Sophocles, although 
he used occasionally to dip into them." The Greek 
dramatists, in fact, seem to have affected Tennyson's 
work but slightly, while he constantly reminds us of 
Virgil, Homer, Theocritus, and even Persius and 
Horace. Mediaeval French, whether in poetry or 
prose, and the poetry of the " Pleiad " seems to have 



LAST CHAPTER 2IO, 

occupied little of his attention. Into the oriental 
literatures he dipped — pretty deeply for his Akbar ; 
and even his Locksley Hall owed something to Sir 
William Jones's version of " the old Arabian 
Moallakat." The debt appears to be infinitesimal. 
He seems to have been less closely familiar with 
Elizabethan poetry than might have been expected : a 
number of his obiter dicta on all kinds of literary 
points are recorded in the Life by Mr. Palgrave. 
" Sir Walter Scott's short tale, My Aunt Margaret's 
Mirror (how little known !), he once spoke of as the 
finest of all ghost or magical stories." Lord Tenny- 
son adds, " The Tapestried Chamber also he greatly 
admired." Both are lost from modern view among 
the short pieces of the last volumes of the Waverley 
novels. Of the poet's interest in and attitude to- 
wards the more obscure pyschological and psychical 
problems — to popular science foolishness — enough 
has been said, but the remarks of Professor Tyndall 
have not been cited : — 

My special purpose in introducing this poem, however, 
was to call your attention to a passage further on which 
greatly interested me. The poem is, throughout, a discus- 
sion between a believer in immortality and one who is 
unable to believe. The method pursued is this. The Sage 
reads a portion of the scroll, which he has taken from the 
hands of his follower, and then brings his own arguments to 
bear upon that portion, with a view to neutralising the 
scepticism of the younger man. Let me here remark that I 
read the whole series of poems published under the title 
" Tiresias," full of admiration for their freshness and vigour. 



220 TENNYSON 

Seven years after I had first read them your father died, and 
you, his son, asked me to contribute a chapter to the book 
which you contemplate publishing. I knew that I had some 
small store of references to my interview with your father 
carefully written in ancient journals. On the receipt of your 
request, I looked up the account of my first visit to Farring- 
ford, and there, to my profound astonishment, I found de- 
scribed that experience of your father's which, in the mouth 
of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground of an important 
argument against materialism and in favour of personal im- 
mortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other 
poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this ex- 
perience once alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but 
here it was recorded in black and white. If you turn to 
your father's account of the wonderful state of consciousness 
superinduced by thinking of his own name, and compare it 
with the argument of the Ancient Sage, you will see that 
they refer to one and the same phenomenon. 

And more, my son ! for more than once when I 
Sat all alone, revolving in myself 
The word that is the symbol of myself, 
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, 
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud 
Melts into heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs 
Were strange, not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, 
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world. 

Any words about Tennyson as a politician are apt 
to excite the sleepless prejudice which haunts the 
political field. He probably, if forced to " put a 
name to it" would have called himself a Liberal. 



LAST CHAPTER 221 

But he was not a social agitator. He never set a rick 
on fire. " He held aloof, in a somewhat detached 
position, from the great social seethings of his age " 
(Mr. Frederic Harrison). But in youth he helped to 
extinguish some flaming ricks. He spoke of the 
"many-headed beast" (the reading public) in terms 
borrowed from Plato. He had no higher esteem for 
mobs than Shakespeare or John Knox professed, 
while his theory of tyrants (in the case of Napoleon 
III about 1852) was that of Liberals like Mr. Swin- 
burne and Victor Hugo. Though to modern enlight- 
enment Tennyson may seem as great a Tory as Dr. 
Johnson, yet he had spoken his word in 1852 for the 
freedom of France, and for securing England against 
the supposed designs of a usurper (now fallen). He 
really believed, obsolete as the faith may be, in guard- 
ing our own, both on land and sea. Perhaps no Con- 
tinental or American critic has ever yet dispraised a 
poetical fellow-countryman merely for urging the 
duties of national union and national defense. A 
critic, however, writes thus of Tennyson : " When 
our poet descends into the arena of party polemics, in 
such things as Rifleman, Form ! Hands all Round, 
The Fleet, and other topical pieces dear to 
the Jingo soul, it is not poetry but journalism." I 
doubt whether the desirableness of the existence of a 
volunteer force and of a fleet really is within the 
arena of party polemics. If any party thinks that we 
ought to have no volunteers, and that it is our duty to 
starve the fleet, what is that party's name ? Who 
Cries, " Down with the Pleet ! Down with National 



222 TENNYSON 

Defense ! Hooray for the Disintegration of the Em- 
pire ! " ? 

Tennyson was not a party man, but he certainly 
would have opposed any such party. If to defend 
our homes and this England be "Jingoism," Tenny- 
son, like Shakespeare, was a Jingo. But, alas ! I do 
not know the name of the party which opposes 
Tennyson, and which wishes the invader to trample 
down England — any invader will do for so philan- 
thropic a purpose. Except when resisting this un- 
named party, the poet seldom or never entered " the 
arena of party polemics." Tennyson could not have 
exclaimed, like Squire Western, " Hurrah for old 
England ! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen have 
landed in Kent ! " He undeniably did write verses 
(whether poetry or journalism) tending to make 
readers take an unfavourable view of honest invaders. 
If to do that is to be a " Jingo," and if such conduct 
hurts the feelings of any great English party, then 
Tennyson was a Jingo and a partisan, and was, so far, 
a rhymester, like Mr. Kipling. Indeed we know that 
Tennyson applauded Mr. Kipling's The English Flag. 
So the worst is out, as we in England count the worst. 
In America and on the continent of Europe, how- 
ever, a poet may be proud of his country's flag with- 
out incurring rebuke from his countrymen. Tennyson 
did not reckon himself a party man ; he believed more 
in political evolution than in political revolution, with 
cataclysms. He was neither an Anarchist nor a 
Home Ruler, nor a politician so generous as to wish 
England to be laid defenseless at the feet of her foes. 



LAST CHAPTER 223 

If these sentiments deserve censure, in Tennyson, 
at least, they claim our tolerance. He was not born 
in a generation late enough to be truely Liberal. Old 
prejudices about "this England," old words from 
Henry V and King *John, haunted his memory and 
darkened his vision of the true proportions of things. 
We draw in prejudice with our mother's milk. The 
mother of Tennyson had not been an Agnostic or a 
Comteist ; his father had not been a staunch true-blue 
anti-Englander. Thus he inherited a certain bias in 
favour of faith and fatherland, a bias from which he 
could never emancipate himself. But tout comprendre 
c'est tout pardonner. Had Tennyson's birth been later, 
we might find in him a more complete realisation of 
our poetic ideal — might have detected less to blame 
or to forgive. 

With that apology we must leave the fame of Ten- 
nyson as a politician to the clement consideration of 
an enlightened posterity. I do not defend his narrow 
insularities, his Jingoism, or the appreciable percent- 
age of faith which blushing analysis may detect in his 
honest doubt ; these things I may regret or condemn, 
but we ought not to let them obscure our view of the 
Poet. He was led away by bad examples. Of all 
Jingoes Shakespeare is the most unashamed, and next 
to him are Drayton, Scott, and Wordsworth, with his 

" Oh, for one hour of that Dundee ! " 

In the years which followed the untoward affair of 
Waterloo young Tennyson fell much under the influ- 
ence of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and the other 



224 TENNYSON 

offenders, and these are extenuating circumstances. 
By a curious practical paradox, where the realms of 
poetry and politics meet, the Tory seem milder of 
mood and more Liberal than the Liberal critics. Thus 
Mr. William Morris was certainly a very advanced 
political theorist ; and in theology Mr. Swinburne has 
written things not easily reconcilable with orthodoxy. 
Yet we find Divine-Right Tories, who in literature 
are fervent admirers of these two poets, and leave 
their heterodoxies out of account. But many Liberal 
critics appear unable quite to forgive Tennyson be- 
cause he did not wish to starve the fleet, and because 
he held certain very ancient, if obsolete, beliefs. 
Perhaps a general amnesty ought to be passed, as far 
as poets are concerned, and their politics and creeds 
should be left to silence, where " beyond these voices 
there is peace." 

One remark, I hope, can excite no prejudice. The 
greatest of the Gordons was a soldier, and lived in re- 
ligion. But the point at which Tennyson's memory 
is blended with that of Gordon is the point of sym- 
pathy with the neglected poor. It is to his wise ad- 
vice, and to affection for Gordon, that we owe the 
Gordon training-school for poor boys ; a good school, 
and good boys come out of that academy. 

The question as to Tennyson's precise rank in the 
glorious role of the Poets of England can never be 
determined by us, if in any case or at any time such 
determinations can be made. We do not, or should 
not, ask whether Virgil or Lucretius, whether .flischy- 
lus or Sophocles, is the- greater poet. The consent 



LAST CHAPTER 225 

of mankind seems to place Homer and Shakespeare 
and Dante high above all. For the rest no prize-list 
can be settled. If influence among aliens is the test, 
Byron probably takes, among our poets, the next 
rank after Shakespeare. But probably there is no 
possible test. In certain respects Shelley, in many 
respects Milton, in some Coleridge, in some Burns, in 
the opinion of a number of persons Browning, are 
greater poets than Tennyson. But for exquisite va- 
riety and varied exquisiteness Tennyson is not readily 
to be surpassed. At one moment he pleases the un- 
critical mass of readers, in another mood he wins the 
verdict of the raffine. It is a success which scarce 
any English poet but Shakespeare has excelled. His 
faults have rarely, if ever, been those of flat-footed, 
" thick-ankled " dulness ; of rhetoric, of common- 
place ; rather have his defects been the excess of his 
qualities. A kind of John Bullishness may also be 
noted, especially in derogatory references to France, 
which, true or untrue, are out of taste and keeping. 
But these errors could be removed by the excision of 
half-a-dozen lines. His later work (as the Voyage of 
Maeldune) shows a just appreciation of ancient Celtic 
literature. A great critic, F. T. Palgrave, has ex- 
pressed, perhaps the soundest appreciation of Tenny- 
son : — 



It is, for " the days that remain " to bear witness to his 
real place in the great hierarchy, amongst whom Dante boldly 
yet justly ranked himself. But if we look at Tennyson's 
work in a twofold aspect : — Here, on the exquisite art in 



2 26 TENNYSON 

which, throughout, his verse is clothed, the lucid beauty of 
the form, the melody almost audible as music, the mysterious 
skill by which the words used constantly strike as the inev- 
itable words (and hence, unforgettable), the subtle allusive 
touches, by which a secondary image is suggested to enrich 
the leading thought, as the harmonic " partials " give rich- 
ness to the note struck upon the string : There, when we 
think of the vast fertility in subject and treatment, united 
with happy selection of motive, the wide range of character, 
the dramatic force of impersonation, the pathos in every va- 
riety, the mastery over the comic and the tragic alike, above 
all, perhaps, those phrases of luminous insight which spring 
direct from imaginative observation of Humanity, true for all 
time, coming from the heart to the heart — his work will 
probably be found to lie somewhere between that of Virgil 
and Shakespeare : having its portion, if I may venture on the 
phrase, in the inspiration of both. 

A professed enthusiast for Tennyson can add noth- 
ing to, and take nothing from, these words of one 
who, though his friend, was too truly a critic to enter- 
tain the admiration that goes beyond idolatry. 



INDEX 



Akbar's Dream, 202, 205. 
Aid worth, 163. 
All along the Valley, 156. 
Ancient Sage, The, 191, 220. 
Argyll, Duke of, 92, 95, 98, 

l SS- 

Arnold, M., 44, 92, 160, 179. 
Arthur, 109, 114. 
Arthurian Legend, 108. 
Austen, Jane, 199. 
Aylmer's Field, 158. 

Balin and Balan, 125. 
Ballads and other Poems, 180, 

181. 
Becket t 186. 
Boadicea, 156. 
Browning, R., 47, 83, 155, 164, 

165, 198, 207. 
Burns, 58, 94. 
Byron, 6. 

Carlyle, 30, 35, 45, 57, 182. 

Charge of the Heavy Brigade, 

un- 
charge of the Light Brigade, 

82. 
Churchwarden and the Curate, 

206. 
Coming of Arthur, 109, 164. 
Croker, J. W., 35. 



Crossing the Bar, 1 98. 
Cup, The, 181. 

Daisy, The, 80. 

Darwin, 61, 95. 

Day-Dream, 42. 

Death of CEnone, 202. 

Defence of Luc know, 1 80. 

Demeter and other Poems, 195. 

Despair, 182. 

Dialect poems, 196. 

Dickens, 45. 

Drama and poets, 167, 168. 

Dramas, the, 166- 190 — dates of, 

166. 
Dream of Fair Women, 27. 

Elaine, 135-143- 
Elizabeth, Queen, 174, 175. 
English Idylls and other Poems, 

39- 
Enid, 1 19- 1 24. 
Enoch Arden t 156-158. 
" Experiments in quantity," 160. 

Falcon, The, 180. 
Farringford, 82, 91. 
First Quarrel, The, 180. 
FitzGerald, E., 164, 165, 178, 

184, 190. 
Fleet, The, 186. 



227 



228 



INDEX 



Foresters, The, 167-202. 
Frater Ave atque Vale, 1 80. 
Froude, 172, 175 

Gardener's Daughter, 29. 
Gareth and Lynette, 166. 
Geraint and Enid, 91. 
Gladstone, 185. 
Gordon, 185, 224. 
Grandmother, The, 80, 94. 
Guinevere, 92, 153. 

Hallam, A. H., 1 1, 12, 20, 30, 

j l f 2I 3- 

Hands all Round, 182. 

Harold, 178. 

Harrison, F., on In Memoriam, 

17, 61 — on the Idylls, 101- 

106, 221. 
Holy Grail, 1 43- 1 48, 164. 
Homer, 154 — translations of, 

160, 161, 195. 
Houghton, Lord, 36, 46. 
Hugo, V., 165, 179. 
Huxley, 165. 

Idylls of the King, 94, IOO, 153. 
In Memoriam, 59-78. 
In the Children 's Hospital, 180. 
Isabel, 162. 

Jerrold, Douglas, 57. 

Jingoism, 222-225. 

Jowctt, 17, 88, 93, 94, 134, 209, 

210, 213. 
J. S., To, 28. 
Juvenilia, 14. 

Kipling, 202, 222, 



Lady of Shalott, 22. 
Lancelot, 103-107, 115. 
Lancelot and Elaine, 134- 139. 
Last Tournament, 149, 165. 
Lockhart, 21, 27, 30, 35, 45. 
Locks ley Hall, 83. 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 

193- 
Longfellow, 163. 
Lotos-Eaters, 27. 
Love and Duly, 40, 
Lover's Tale, 7. 
Lucretius, 164. 

Lushington, Edmund, 36, 198. 
Lytton, Lord, 47. 

Mabinogion, 38, 91 — quoted, 

116. 
Malory, 10 1- 107 — prose quoted, 

116, 120. 
Mariana, 14. 
Marriage of Geraint, 114. 
Mary, Queen, 169- 177 — Mary 

and history, 169-175. 
Maud, 80-91. 
May Queen, 26. 
Merlin, in, 132. 
Merlin and the Gleam, 198. 
Merlin and Vivien, 130-134. 
Miller's Daughter, 24. 
Morte d Arthur, 29, 31, 38. 
Musset, Alfred do, 215. 
Mystic, The, 15. 
Mysticism in Tennyson, 192, 

219. 

Northern Farmer, 156, 165. 

Ode on Wellington, 80. 
Ginone, 25. 



INDEX 



229 



Palace of Art, The, 25. 
Palgrave, F. T., 94, 156, 21 X, 

216, 225. 
Parody on Tennyson, 79. 
Passing of Arthur, 153. 
Peel, 44. 

Pel leas and Ettarre, 147. 
Plagiarism, 201. 
Poems by Two Brothers, 6. 
Poets and Critics, 206. 
Poets and the drama, 166. 
Princess, The, 44. 
Promise of May, The, 183. 

Queen Mary, 1 69-177 — Mary 

and history 169-175. 
Queen Victoria, 79. 

Revenge, The, 180. 
Ping, The, 197. 
Rizpah, 180. 
Ruskin, 95, 98. 

Scotland, visits to, 81, 184. 
Scott, Walter, 4, 81, 83, 200, 

219. 
Sea Dreams, 158. 
Sellar, Mrs., 81. 
Shakespeare, 167, 223, 225. 
Shelley, 7. 

Sir Galahad, 42, 155. 
Song of the Wrens, 162. 



Spedding, James, 28, 35, 182. 
Spinster's Sweet Arts, 193. 
Spiritualism, 164. 
St. Telemachus, 204. 
Stoddart, Thomas Tod, 24. 
Swinburne, 92, 149, 167, 180. 

Taine, 215. 

Tennyson, Charles, 32, 179. 
Tennyson, Frederick, 6. 
Thackeray, 10, 36, 57, 92, 97, 

134, 155- 
Theocritus, 34, 99, 123, 218. 
limbuctoo, 12. 

Tiresias and other Poems, 190. 
Tithonus, 155. 
Two Voices, 31, 41. 
Tyndall, 219. 

Ulysses, 40. 

Fastness, 196. 
Village Wife, The, 180. 
Virgil, 201. 
Virgil, To, 193. 
Vision of Sin, 42. 
Vivien, 130. 
Voyage of Maeldune, 180. 

Wellington, Ode on, 80. 
Window, The 162. 
Wordsworth, 44. 



THE END. 



OCT 24 \m 



